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The World Health Organization has said that Air Pollution and Climate Change are one of the biggest threats to human health on a global scale.
"90% of people in the world inhale polluted air daily, causing 7 million premature deaths yearly." (WHO Top Threats)
This leads to an interesting fact:
Healthcare is one of leading contributors to waste production in the United States. Approximately 30% of the health care spending may be considered waste.
A major portion of this waste is plastics and single-use items. Is there a better way to provide the same level of care to our patients with less waste?
Research Studies:
Julie Kleber, BSN, RN, BMTCN, and Bevin Cohen, PhD, MPH, MS, RN have written an article describing the way that plastic medical waste is used and disposed of, and how these practices can be changed in small but effective ways. In their article they even go into detail about what nurses can do on a unit level to help reduce the amount of plastic usage and waste is consumed on a daily basis. (Reducing Waste and Increasing Sustainability, 2020).
Conduct Primary Research:
There seem to be many opportunities to look within our own organizations to ask the difficult, but meaningful questions:
"How much waste are we producing every day? Every week? Every year? Where can we make changes to reduce the amount of single-use and/or plastic items?"
One other arena that can make a large impact on reducing the amount of waste in healthcare is mitigating the number of supplies/items that reach their expiration date before usage.
How many items are thrown away or discarded because they were past their expiration date?
It will be valuable to include experts from many areas within the healthcare system to understand the depth of this problem. From purchasing and Materials Management team, all the way to the clinical teams that use the items in direct patient care and even the teams in Environmental Services who help dispose of these products. It will be a full team effort to begin to understand the scope and scale of this task.
The MindMap with all references and articles is available at: https://mm.tt/2133958857?t=LMNKUg81yZ
Credits:
Created with images by Pixource - "pollution factory industry" • yogendras31 - "contamination water pollution lake" • Hans - "plastic bottles bottles recycling" • RitaE - "garbage waste container waste" • Tumisu - "coronavirus virus mask" • Monoar_CGI_Artist - "clock alarm clock watch"