Sustainability Initiative Part 6

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Kaplan et al., provides an overview of sustainable hospital setup and how the same can be used to cut down on costs. The healthcare sector is one of the areas with huge and expensive environmental footprints. Most of the facilities have machines and equipment that run on high energy requirements and therefore there is need to ensure that energy saving mechanisms are implemented to cut down on energy consumptions. This helps ensure energy efficiency in the health care system. Kaplan et al. through their study were able to achieve huge saving after cutting down on energy consumption as well as minimizing on wastages especially on lighting and choice of bulbs. This supports my sustainability initiative based on energy efficiency. Once energy efficiency has been achieved the cost of services is revised accordingly ensuring patients also benefit. Efficiency can be achieved to a great extent by ensuring patience education on use of energy consuming devices in their rooms among other aspects.

Castro et al., 2015 explores several action plans designed to ensure that operating costs and resource consumption in the healthcare sector is reduced accordingly to ensure sustainability measures work to produce positive results. Apart from minimising environmental impact measures are being taken to ensure that wastages are fully cut off. Healthcare sector remains one of the most regulated as well the highest consumer of energy per unit floor area. Given the different scenarios that different hospitals operate there is need to rely on a bench mark for ensuring that there is a standard that can be used to gauge energy use. Castro et al., provides a platform for building sustainability assessment (BSA). This is therefore a key resource in building my energy efficiency sustainability initiative.

References

Castro, M. D. F., Mateus, R., Serôdio, F., & Bragança, L. (2015). Development of

benchmarks for operating costs and resources consumption to be used in healthcare building sustainability assessment methods. Sustainability, 7(10), 13222-13248.

Kaplan, S., Sadler, B., Little, K., Franz, C., & Orris, P. (2012). Can sustainable

hospitals help bend the health care cost curve?. Commonwealth Fund.