Bike to Work Week is Next Week!
You can always bike to work to get outside, get in shape, improve Toronto’s notorious gridlock, and save money, but this coming week you get to win prizes too! Come one, come all, and join the 2-wheeled revolution!
Scroll down to see what’s Happening at UHN (or look at it nice and neatly on the Bike to Work Poster) email me to register…
BIKE TO WORK – May 28
Pledge to bike to work by clicking here and enter to win a trip for 2 to Quebec City. Contact lisa.vanlint@uhn.ca with your pledge number.
BIKE SAFETY WORKSHOP – May 29
Learn how to cycle safely & get a little something for your bike.
Toronto General
May 29, 2012 noon – 1 p.m
Eaton North Wing, EN1-441
BIKE CLINICS – May 30, 31
Get tips on how to maintain your bike from an expert mechanic and get a little something for your bike.
Toronto General
May 30, 2012 noon – 1 p.m (FULL)
AND A NEW SESSION at 1 – 2 PM (not full)
outside University Ave entrance
Toronto Western
May 31, 2012 noon – 1 p.m.
outdoor patio (Dundas St. entrance)
Space is limited so email Lisa.vanlint@uhn.ca to register for the clinics or workshop.
And if that’s not enough, here’s a little something to make you laugh on 2-wheels (thanks Ed!)…
High school seniors suspended for biking to school
http://grist.org/list/high-school-seniors-suspended-for-biking-to-school/#.T72TEpSAE-k.email
Happy biking!
Lisa
Finding TLC In All The Right Places
TLC has a way of sneaking up on you when you least expect it. You’re sitting around, minding your own business when, whamo, a little bit of TLC comes your way.
Now, before you think I’m going all country on you (not that there’s anything wrong with going country, y’all), remember that TLC – Care to Conserve is UHN’s integrated energy management program, the one that combines the best of people with the best of technology with the aim of minimizing energy wastage and maximizing energy efficiency. Google it…it’s out there.
So, back to the TLC. My meeting near the Toronto General Management offices has just ended, and I’m sitting in the room, feeling a little Urban Cowboy-ish, humming a little Johnny Lee, just catching up on life on the ranch and minding my own business when, whamo, in walks Jen, hand raised, ready to turn off the lights. I’m shocked (she’s showing such determination, such focus), she’s shocked (what’s he doing sitting alone in this room?) but we laugh and I promise to turn off the lights once I leave. Turns out Jen has adopted this corner of UHN, making sure the lights are off in the two meeting rooms by her desk, saving UHN hundreds, heck, maybe even thousands (it’s a big room) in electricity costs over the years, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and helping keep the air clean.
Just one little story of finding TLC in all the right places…
The Great Case for Babies and Bathwater
Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Like most expressions, though we know what it means…don’t throw out the good with the bad… we usually have no idea who started saying it or why.
Back in the olden, golden days when water, hot or otherwise, was scarce, bath time was a very shared family event. After fetching the water, boiling it and filling the cast-iron tub, the father of the household usually had first dibs (it was the olden days after all). After he scrubbed off weeks, months or years of muck, the rest of the family had their turn (do I hear a collective eeeewww?). Finally, the baby was bathed in the nastiest, murkiest, darkest of waters. The baby was pretty well-disguised in all that debris, and thus the expression was born.
There’s a handy little group, Operation Green, that’s taking this principle to heart by salvaging some really great stuff from our otherwise icky operating room waste. This great stuff is called “Surgical Overage”, items that were readied for surgery but never used, only to be sadly discarded. Not only does Operation Green keep these valuable supplies out of landfill, or worse…the incinerator, they ship it to developing countries that hardly have two bandaids to rub together. Now these countries have access to clean gloves, sutures, gowns, dressings, defibrillators or portable x-rays (it may be last-year’s model, but it’s still good). We save the hauling fee by not having these perfectly good supplies sent off as waste. And a kitten and a puppy play beneath a double rainbow…it’s that good!
The best part about Operation Green? It’s run by volunteers, very already busy med-student volunteers. They’ve been saving supplies and sending shipment from UHN since 2010…enough to fill an operating room from top to bottom. A giant thank you goes to Alison, Kim and Sheron, our Operation Green volunteers. They’ve found worthy homes around the world for these supplies. They’ve also recruited new volunteers so that when they graduate, the program lives on.
Now it’s great that they’re here saving people and the planet simultaneously, but they need your help. If you work at UHN and know of good medical supplies that will go to waste i.e. if the powers that be insist on using a new doohickey model, let’s donate the old doohickey model before it collects dust in the supply room. Or maybe you’re heading on a medical mission and can bring some supplies with you. Or maybe you just want to share a pot of tea. Whatever your reason, contact them at OperationGreen@uhn.ca. The babies in the bathwater will thank you.
Earlier in the week I blogged from CleanMed on the pleasure of being among hundreds of other people working towards sustainability in healthcare.
Now, with a bumpy plane ride and a couple of time zones to reflect (Denver, I love ya, but your mountain winds sure can make my head hurt), here are the moments that resonated.
It’s Dr. Ted Schettler speaking about his work on pollution and health, and the database that summarizes links between chemical contaminants and approximately 180 human diseases or conditions.
It’s Dr. Richard Jackson, formerly at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and current professor at UCLA, showing that many of the diseases putting strain on our healthcare system – diabetes, obesity, childhood asthma – are linked to the way we build, live-in and treat our environment…all detailed in the Designing Healthy Communities series on PBS.
It’s the physician who reminded us that 96% of scientists working on climate research agree that human activity is causing climate change…and pointed out that if 96% of pediatricians told us our child was sick, there wouldn’t be a “debate”, there would be action.
It’s the other physician on the same panel who drew the link between climate change and how it’s affecting the way we need to build and operate our hospitals and the care we provide within them…and the free book published by the Catholic Health Association of the United States that details all.
And it’s Dr. Jeffrey Thompson, CEO of Gundersen Lutheran Health System, who drew the link between someone turning on a light in one of the hospitals he oversees and the health of children worldwide…and how that realization has motivated him towards sustainability and millions of dollars in cost savings. He also spoke of an initiative that involved renewable energy, saving money and a brewery…sounds like the perfect job to me!
And it’s the speaker who said that to do nothing is to accept., and to accept something is to support it…which is why, as lonely as greening healthcare can be sometimes, it’s easy being green.
It really is.
Sigh. Life sure can be lonely here at Energy & Environment. Sure, there’s me and Lisa, UHN’s Energy Steward. And our six Waste Teams. And our half-dozen Energy Teams. And our almost 600 Green Team members. And the thousands of UHNers who help green the hospital every day.
But sometimes that’s not enough.
Sometimes you want to say things like, “we’re working with our GPO to put some EPP in an RFP to get DEHP out of our IVs” and not have people look at you like you’ve inspected one too many recycling bins.
Sometimes you want to be in a room of people who get just as excited as you do when looking at a multi-coloured pie-chart entitled “breakdown of waste characterization from an audit on an inpatient unit in a large teaching hospital”.
Luckily, once a year there’s CleanMed. Billed as the premier environmental conference for healthcare sustainability (yes, there is more than one conference on healthcare sustainability), CleanMed brings together people from across North America and the world to talk about how healthcare is affecting the environment. And how the environment is affecting health. And how affected health requires more healthcare. And how healthcare is affecting the environment. And how the environment…
There are CEOs, CFOs and GPOs. There are Nurses and sustainability professionals like me. There are people looking to buy green products for healthcare, and people looking to sell green products to healthcare. There are big hospital systems embedding environmental sustainability into their very being and there are small clinics just starting to put a recycling program together. In short, there are hundreds gathered to share, laugh, cry, support, plan and just generally talk about greening healthcare.
Because sometimes you just want to say things like, “we’re working with our GPO to put some EPP in an RFP to get DEHP out of our IVs”…
UHN Gets Down & Dirty on Earth Day!
TGH EarthDay Booth with Heather and Ashley
Before you make a not-so-friendly phone call to HR, get your mind out of the gutter…the dirty part was actual soil from our trees for toonies, a wildly successful new part of our Earth Day Festivities. But that’s not all! (please ignore the familiar tones of the guy selling ShamWows on late-night TV…I’m just really excited!) On April 19th, Toronto General, Princess Margaret and Toronto Western Hospitals all hosted Earth Day Booths to spread some knowledge and enthusiasm to UHN staff. A giant thank you goes out to the 25 green team volunteers that worked before and on the day to get this going, to the 109 staff who signed the Green Pledge, the 136 people who bought a tree, and to the countless more that lingered to learn a thing or 2 (though if we were to count in a ballpark sort of way, it would be near 800).
In case you missed it, our booths had oodles of info on energy conservation i.e. giving a flick, recycling, composting, and the 20 great green ideas you may remember from Revolutions 2012. We had an LED light display and savings calculator showing the brighter LED using just 7 measly watts vs the incandescent energy hog using 60 (thank you Green team member Daniel Cotfas). We also collected staff’s old cell phones for proper electronics recycling.
And who knew that in addition to being enviro-champs, those green team volunteers know how to shill (shameless plug…why not join the Green Team?). They sold 136 trees for toonies, so that staff could bring 1, 2 or 10 home to plant in their gardens. What a great idea by GT member Heather Ford! I personally planted 3 with my family on Earth Day. We still have a few left so contact me ASAP if you’d like some. Anything left at the end of the week will be planted in the UHN Urban Garden to get even bigger before the next event. So don’t be a sap…plant a sapling.
The best part of the event was that we were in great company. Just in case you’ve ever felt it’s not easy being green, just you and your recycling bin against the world, you should know there’s a whole network of us out there. UHN, Mt. Sinai, St. Michael’s, Credit Valley/Trillium, St. Joseph’s, and Toronto East General Hospitals all united for simultaneous Earth Day Events on that very same Thursday, April 19th. We even put together a joint presentation which you may or may not have had a chance to see at our booths (TGH had success, but PMH and TWH experienced…um…technical difficulties…but bless SIMS for trying). Even the Ontario Public Services Greening Office celebrated simultaneously.
We had a friendly competition to see how many staff would sign the green pledge. Our whopping 109 signed pledges were nicely distributed between the 3 sites at UHN. St. Michael’s had 60 signatures, Toronto East General had 85, St. Joe’s scored 132 pledges and gave pledges free seedlings, Trillium’s 2 sites got 95 in total, and Mt. Sinai had quite a few as well. That’s around 600 hospital staff all trying their best to be green…finally something good to call HR about.
-Lisa
Spring Cleanin’ Time – Talkin’ Trash, April 2012
Spring has sprung, the grass has riz, there’s a bunch of Energy & Environment spring cleaning odd and ends to share, so riddle me this…
Riddle: What has around 300 heads and is green all-over?
Answer: UHN’s volunteer Green Team.
Riddle: What has around 301 heads and is green all-over?
Answer: UHN’s Green Team after you’ve joined. No meetings, no homework, just you joining hundreds of your colleagues already helping green UHN.
Riddle: What has no heads and is dark all-over?
Answer: An empty room, after the lights, computer, monitor and other stuff were turned off before everyone left. Become a TLC – Care to Conserve champion and help UHN see the dark.
Riddle: What’s black and white and green and read all-over?
Answer: The 2011 Energy & Environment annual report, detailing environmental activities from last year, as well as hopes, dreams and aspirations for the year to come.
Riddle: The annual report is, like, so last year, what have you done for me lately?
Answer: Get the latest scoop on what’s what with the greening what in the oh-so-creatively titled UHN Greening Activities available on the Energy & Environment intranet page.
Riddle: What’s the next best thing to having Energy & Environment come to your department for a greening info session?
Wiseguy Answer: Not having Energy & Environment come to your department.
Real Answer: Sitting down to take the Energy & Environment eLearning module…log on to UHN’s eLearning site, search for course code “UHUHEN001W” and let the good times begin.
Riddle: What’s icky, yucky, goopy, potentially dangerous and expensive to throw out?
Answer: Biomedical waste – from needles, to blood waste, biomedical waste needs to be properly disposed for safety and legal reasons. Biomedical waste is also much more expensive to dispose of than regular waste…it doesn’t matter how icky, yucky, goopy or potentially dangerous your lunch is, it doesn’t need to go in yellow or red biomedical waste bags. Get the details on the Hazardous Waste Disposal @ UHN poster on the Energy & Environment intranet page.
Riddle: What’s sharp and sharp and sharp all-over?
Answer: Needles, especially if they’re accidentally left on patient meal trays or on samples sent to the lab for processing. Please take extra care to ensure that sharps, including those used by self-medicating patients, are appropriately disposed.
Riddle: What was black and then grey and now clear all over?
Answer: UHN’s new garbage bags. While garbage for landfill is currently collected in grey or black bags, we’ll soon be using clear bags for both garbage and recyclables, which will allow our cleaners to see what’s inside the bag. Looking for a recycling bin? Think blue, but please remember that at UHN (with the exception of Lyndhurst and Rumsey) paper cannot be mixed with metal, glass and plastic for recycling. Get all the details on the Recycling @ UHN poster on the Energy & Environment intranet page.
Happy Spring,
-ed
Ed Rubinstein 
Kady Cowan 
Lisa Vanlint 
