Making doctors’ practices greener: you can’t manage what you don’t measure

Frumkin and colleagues discuss the need for hope in tackling the climate emergency.1 Many junior doctors are climate change activists. But ward and surgical environments are not geared to combat the climate crisis.Waste is rampant. Staff shortages, bed pressures, and stress fuel the abuse and misuse of single use supplies. We need only glance around a doctors’ office to see this: mounds of disposable coffee cups, sprawls of unused paper, half touched masks, and overflowing bins. Our focus is on the clinical tasks at hand. We aren’t thinking about the cost of materials or the costs to our planet.In the words of management guru Peter Drucker, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”2 Data are needed to drive both top-down and bottom-up change. The non-profit organisation Practice Greenhealth has a free cost of ownership calculator, designed to look at costs beyond the price tag and evaluate hidden expenses…
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