Sustainable Health Care: Mercury and Waste

We are living during a time in which climate change, chemical contamination, and unsustainable resource use are all worsening the public’s health.  These environmental health problems are increasing pressure on, and eroding the capacity of, already thinly stretched health care systems.  The health sector itself is paradoxically further contributing to these issues, even as it attempts to address their impacts. Through the products and technologies it deploys, the resources it consumes, the waste it generates and the buildings it constructs and operates, the health sector is a significant source of pollution around the world.  Nurses, doctors, hospitals, health systems and ministries of health are increasingly at the center of the effort to promote sustainable solutions in their own institutions and communities.  Whether substituting hazardous chemicals with safer alternatives, reducing a hospital’s climate footprint, or eliminating a community’s exposure to health care waste, these public health trailblazers recognize that we cannot have healthy people on a sick planet, and are putting the health sector at the forefront of the global movement for environmental health.  Health Care Without Harm’s (HCWH) Global Green and Healthy Hospitals Agenda is an effort to build on the good work happening around the world, and engender an approach to sustainability and health that can be replicated by thousands of hospitals in a diversity of countries and health settings.  A joint effort of WHO, HCWH, NDP, and the GEF, the Health Care Waste program promotes best practices and techniques to minimize or eliminate releases of persistent organic pollutants and mercury to the environment. Examples discussed will include Argentina, India, Latvia, Lebanon, the Philippines, Senegal and Vietnam.  The program works closely with WHO, Ministries of Health, and Health Care institutions to develop policies and regulations to secure the safe replacement of mercury devices and promote quality patient care.