More than one box of gloves per patient, per day. Glass bottles of IV paracetamol filling the waste room. Intensive care saves lives, but at what cost to the planet?
In this episode of the eCritCare Podcast, Dr Swapnil Pawar is joined by Dr Nicole Hunfeld, ICU pharmacist and Chief Sustainability Officer at Erasmus University Medical Centre, Rotterdam, associate professor in sustainable healthcare, chair of the Dutch Green ICU Network and co-chair of the ESICM Environmental Sustainability Committee. Nicole shares how a COVID-era frustration became the Green ICU movement, now spread across all 70 ICUs in the Netherlands and beyond.
In this conversation:
How overflowing plastic waste during COVID sparked the Green ICU project
The material flow hotspot analysis, published in Intensive Care Medicine, that gave the team data and a narrative
108 gloves per patient per day, and the journey of a single nitrile glove from Spain to Malaysia to Rotterdam
Low hanging fruit: swapping blueys for towels, the "No risk, no glove" campaign, and IV to oral switches
Why the paper recycling idea failed completely, and what it taught the team about going slow
The paracetamol challenge: a giant tablet, 40 hospitals signing up in one day, and around 18,000 euros saved in a year on one drug
Measuring what matters: carbon, cost and nurse workload
Building a national network with a mixed nurse and intensivist committee
Keeping momentum: green leaf icons in protocols and "oral first" prompts in the EHR
Corporate anthropology and why you should embrace the no
Where to start in your own ICU
Read this episode on Substack: https://critcareedu.substack.com/p/green-icu-sustainable-intensive-care
Please send us your feedback @ icuprimaryprepcast@gmail.com
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