I'm Paul Whaley, communications coordinator for HCWH Europe

[paulwhaley]

Hi everyone,

My name is Paul Whaley. I'm campaign support and communications coordinator for the European division of a global coalition of NGOs, health and environment groups and hospitals called Health Care Without Harm. We are working to make healthcare more environmentally sustainable.

Why healthcare? Because the mission of healthcare is to prevent illness as well as cure it. Since pollution, exposure to toxic chemicals and global warming all affect human health, we think hospitals and healthcare facilities have an obligation to adopt and encourage sustainable practices.

Amongst many activities, this includes phasing out substances such as PVC (terrible environmental and profile across its lifecycle), becoming more energy-efficient and less dependent on fossil fuels, and minimising material consumption and waste production.

I'm very happy to be working where I am. We are quite different to many other environmental organisations, and we face a tremendous challenge in introducing the importance of environmental factors in people's health into the culture of healthcare delivery.

That's enough, I think. I hope I can make some kind of interesting and/or useful contribution to this forum! (Website is Health Care Without Harm, by the way)

-Paul

[fabian]

Hello Paul.

Welcome to the forum.

Great to have you here and I am looking forward to read your contributions to our discussion.

Fabian

[Matt Crane]

Hello Paul,

I'm also new here, we are trying to raise awareness of energy wastage in IT resources. We are a commercial organisation with a solution that creates a centralised policy for Pc and monitors making them as effective as they can be in terms of the power draw they use and carbon emissions.

We are getting there slowly in the UK, NHS is coming round gradually.

Feel free to take a tour of our site, sorry if this sounds commercial but its for the right reasons I hope.

Matt
www.it-energy.co.uk - Home

[gobeithio]

Glad to hear you are getting there with the NHS. The hospitals and staff acommodations I have visited have included some unbelievable examples of wastage. Odd really that in a leviathan organisation which suffers from being told to meet lots of inappropriate targets, that energy wastage has only recently been prioritised.
So many of the staff are intelligent and socially responsible people, that you can't help thinking that if we can't make progress there, then where can we?

Perhaps there is some truth in the adage that medical staff can be like teachers - they are capable of great initiatives, as long as they believe it was their own idea !

[paulwhaley]

Hi gobeithio - it's funny that you should say:

"So many of the staff are intelligent and socially responsible people, that you can't help thinking that if we can't make progress there, then where can we?"

That's exactly what my organisation thinks. One of our objectives is to get healthcare folks to speak out on these kind of issues.

Although we're still pretty new on the scene in Europe, over the years our colleagues in the US have developed a strong relationship with nurses who are concerned about the effect of pollutants on health.

Their successes are documented in the The Luminary Project website, which is here if you want to take a look:

http://www.theluminaryproject.org/story.php

The website is not immediately enticing, but there are lots of examples of how nurses have made changes in their workplaces.

Hope that's interesting for you,
Paul

[gobeithio]

thanks Paul. It was interesting actually. I'm all in favour of concentrating on quick gains; involvement of the doctors & nurses in a coordinated venture that is given local relevance seems a winning strategy that could do a lot relatively quickly.
The recent hospital building programme should help, as at least one of the buildings I had in mind has been sold off in favour of a shiny new one. One would imagine that there must be an urgency in establishing good environmental housekeeping in the new ones. I can't wish you enough good luck, stay in touch.

g