Making Hospitals Greener and Patients Healthier
source: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1867002,00.html
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- DeliaTheArtist
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"A doctor's principle code is, "First, do no harm." The irony is that your doctor's office or hospital may be making you sicker. Indeed, many hospitals are built with materials, like particleboard, PVC flooring and even conventional paint, that can leach poisonous substances. What's more, the chemicals used to clean hospitals — chlorine, laundry detergents and softeners, ammonia — contain toxic ingredients and can cause respiratory disease. In fact, studies suggest that nurses, who spend long hours at the hospital, have among the highest rates of environmentally induced asthma of any profession.
Enter "green medicine" — the effort to detoxify the healing environment and enhance patients' and employees' health, while reducing costs all around. The international advocacy group Health Care Without Harm (HCWH) — whose 2006 study of 1,200 nurses suggested a link between the hospital environmental and health problems among the staff — has been a pioneer in the movement, recently initiating collaborative research among major U.S. health systems to document how removing toxins from the environment impacts worker safety and lost time due to employee illness.
The idea of greener — and cheaper — health is catching on fast among health-care CEOs. Some 150 registered health-care industry construction projects currently underway — involving about 30 million sq. ft. of new building space — have pledged to adopt the Green Guide for Health Care (GGHC), a sustainable design toolkit developed in part by HCWH, which helps the health-care sector construct healthier buildings from the start, according to Cohen. For example, the guide suggests ways to maintain indoor air quality, as indoor pollution can cause or aggravate many health conditions and threaten the well-being of patients with compromised immune systems."
Enter "green medicine" — the effort to detoxify the healing environment and enhance patients' and employees' health, while reducing costs all around. The international advocacy group Health Care Without Harm (HCWH) — whose 2006 study of 1,200 nurses suggested a link between the hospital environmental and health problems among the staff — has been a pioneer in the movement, recently initiating collaborative research among major U.S. health systems to document how removing toxins from the environment impacts worker safety and lost time due to employee illness.
The idea of greener — and cheaper — health is catching on fast among health-care CEOs. Some 150 registered health-care industry construction projects currently underway — involving about 30 million sq. ft. of new building space — have pledged to adopt the Green Guide for Health Care (GGHC), a sustainable design toolkit developed in part by HCWH, which helps the health-care sector construct healthier buildings from the start, according to Cohen. For example, the guide suggests ways to maintain indoor air quality, as indoor pollution can cause or aggravate many health conditions and threaten the well-being of patients with compromised immune systems."
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- groups:
- News and Politics, Green, Earth and Science, Health
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- tags:
- News and Politics, Green, Earth and Science, Health, 3 more
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stopnoise
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I knew this and I had commented with several friends that have been to some hospitals. They said they could not sleep that well, the noise was disruptive. I even know people that got infections by just visiting some hospitals.
- 3 years ago
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stopnoise
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Sons_Of_Liberty
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No wonder hospital's are asking for part of the bailout...guess you can't build if people can't pay $6,000 for a bandaid.
Rule of thumb, don't spend money you don't got.
- 3 years ago
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Sons_Of_Liberty
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realitybytes
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i did not know this. thats a great idea!
- 3 years ago
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realitybytes
