Energy Efficiency in a Hospital – Sustainability Initiative Proposal

Assignment Instructions

Select a health care setting you want to focus on for your sustainability initiative (e.g., local hospital, veterans hospital, ambulance service, urgent care, nursing home, etc.). Analyze the setting you have selected and break it down to the main departments, employee roles, operating activities, etc. While doing so, brainstorm opportunities to reduce costs or eliminate waste while improving patient care or outcomes. Review the list of sustainable initiatives from the list below, and select one that you want to promote for your course project:

Energy efficiency
Lighting
IR scanning
Cogeneration
Kanban Inventory
Device exchange
CR pack reformation
Device reprocessing
Red bag waste reduction
Blue wrap recycling

Identify data sources you might need to collect and analyze for your initiative. Consider contacting people in the industry and at your organization who may be able to help. Write a 525- to 700-word proposal of the sustainability initiative you want to promote at the health care setting you selected. Your proposal should:

Create a clear vision or mission statement that defines the scope of the initiative and would generate buy-in.
Define what outcomes you expect to achieve over time.
Be specific with what you can realistically deliver.

Energy Efficiency Sustainability Initiative Proposal For a Local Hospital

The health care setting that I want to center on for the sustainability initiative is a local hospital. A local hospital is a large health care organization comprising of the emergency department, primary care unit, intensive care unit, laboratory unit, gynecology, and obstetrics unit, cardiology units, physiology unit, Surgery, wards, and maternity unit, among others. Being a local hospital focuses on providing general medical care to the residents, including specialized care. The hospital contains different employees, including medical specialists in other units of operations, nurses, administrative staff, and cleaning and catering staff. The primary role of medical specialists is to save lives and to improve patients’ quality of life. The nurses’ primary function is to offer holistic care where quality is ensured. In general, the team should focus on providing good patient outcomes and a high level of satisfaction. The administrative team’s central role is to ensure smooth learning of operations supporting medical services provision. The cleaning team ensures the hospital is generally clean, while the catering team ensures inpatients are well fed, following the set menus, based on the patient’s needs. While performing their activities, all hospital employees should ensure a high operational efficiency level as a way of cost management. This includes effective use of hospital resources without being wasteful (Bentley et al., 2008).

The sustainable initiative that will be used to promote the course project is energy efficiency. Local hospitals’ operations utilize electric energy in different operations, including lighting, powering computers and other electronic devices used in different operation units, heating water, and sometimes steaming for sterilization, air conditioning, and heating, among other things. All these activities result in high energy consumptions, consequently creating very high utility bills for the hospital. The primary mission of this sustainability initiative is to reduce energy wastage in all hospital operations. The sustainability initiative’s central vision is to achieve the highest level of energy efficiency by eliminating energy wastage and shifting the highest percentage of the energy used in the hospital to green energy.

The main aim of this sustainability initiative is to achieve energy efficiency. The sustainability initiative’s short-term goal is to improve energy efficiency by focusing on lighting and heating systems. The long-term goal is to adjust the hospital structure to reduce the need to use energy for different operations such as air conditioning and heating and shift to green energy production for main energy-consuming activities such as heating in the hospital. To achieve this, the hospital will initially focus on reducing energy wastage in various areas of operations. For instance, the hospital may adopt energy-saving lighting bulbs to reduce the amount of power used to light them. More improved bulbs will be used to ensure proper lighting at low watts. The hospital will also use LED lamps for exterior lighting (Teke & Timur, 2014).

In the long-run, the hospital will focus on making various changes in its buildings to reduce the energy used in air conditioning and heating. Boilers, hot water tanks, and water heaters will be insulated to avoid heat loss. The current boilers will be replaced with high-efficiency boilers (Teke & Timur, 2014). Energy auditing can be done on the hospital building to determine areas that may need improvement to reduce the energy dependence to create the required environmental temperature or air circulation (Reddy, Sandbhor & Dabir, 2019). With audit results, the hospital can also consider insulating roofs, window shading, utilization of air curtains, and the use of draught-proofing. The buildings can also be adjusted to create free cooling by natural air. The hospital will also adopt solar energy for boilers and heating water used for normal operations (Fitriani, Sangadji & Kristiawan, 2017). The changes will help the hospital to cut electrical bills and dependence on electrical energy for daily operations.

Get Your Custom Paper From Professional Writers. 100% Plagiarism Free, No AI Generated Content and Good Grade Guarantee. We Have Experts In All Subjects.

Place Your Order Now