Recycling, single-use items, and greener processes for your practice

In this Contemporary Pediatrics interview, Shreya Doshi joined us to once again discuss ways to improve health care sustainability in your practice. In this video, Doshi highlighted recycling habits and how contamination can impact overall results.

Transcript (edited for clarity):

Shreya Doshi, MBBS, FAAP:

In each inpatient or outpatient setting. I think it's important to implement recycling programs for papers, plastics, electronics, and medical waste. We're using single-stream recycling, which means that we're putting all these different types of things that can be recycled in 1 system, and that's how it is supposed to be, but then the contamination rate for that is very high. A lot of times, things that are not supposed to go into recycling end up going into the recycling bin, and that makes it really challenging to process that recycling waste. So it's important to understand what should truly go into the recycling bin. If you have a supply chain manager for your clinic or inpatient setting try to talk to them about procuring single-use items. First, try reducing single-use item consumption as much as possible, and if you have to use it, procuring it in a sustainable way. Optimizing pharmaceutical practices, so not just prescribing medications only when necessary, but also reducing your IV medication consumption as much as possible. The reason being, IV medications have a much higher carbon footprint, just the way by which they're manufactured and transported than oral medications. So if you can switch from IV to PO sooner in the course of treatment, that's always helpful. So for example, if you have a patient with pneumonia who's in the hospital and they're on ampicillin, if they're able to take PO,, switch them to amoxicillin sooner rather than later. So that's a good example. Then lastly, adopting green building principles, so incorporating sustainability in the design and construction of your health care sustainability. Using solar panels if you have the option to, [or] implementing energy efficient HVAC systems. Those are some of the more operational things.