Hospital named to Practice Greenhealth’s 2023 Circles of Excellence for Waste, Food, Energy and Green Building
Vermont Business Magazine UVM Medical Center is once again among the nation’s leading hospitals for innovative approaches focused to environmental sustainability in health care, after receiving multiple awards for its sustainability efforts around waste, food, energy and green building.
Practice Greenhealth, which provides environmental solutions to more than 1,400 hospitals and health systems across the United States, recently named UVM Medical Center to its Circles of Excellence for Waste, Food, Energy and Green Building.
The Circle of Excellence awards honor the nation’s 10 highest-performing hospitals in multiple categories of sustainability.
“Sustainability is part of our culture at UVM Medical Center,” said Diane Imrie, Director of Nutrition Services at the Medical center and Chairperson of the hospital’s Sustainability Council. “From our partnerships with local farmers to provide food for our patients and employees, to diverting tens of thousands of pounds of medical waste from landfills each year, sustainability means constantly looking at how we can make a positive impact on the health and safety of our environment, as well as our patients and people.”
Innovative Initiatives, Partnerships Focus on Sustainability
Initiatives and partnerships that focus on reducing medical waste, providing healthy and sustainably-sourced food, and optimizing energy use and reducing equipment-related issues continued to serve as the foundation of the Medical Center’s focus on environmental sustainability.
Longstanding partnerships with local farmers like Maple Wind Farm, which provides the Medical Center’s poultry, continued in 2022 and create savings for both the famers and the hospital. The Medical Center also entered a new partnership with Joe’s Kitchen at Screamin’ Ridge Farm to develop recipes for patient food service and produce chicken and beef stock –creating a supply chain that uses locally-sourced ingredients and reduces food waste. The hospital also expanded its broader support of the region’s farm network by investing $10,000 in seed funding to support Bloomtrain, a regional campaign of farmers working to heal land and care for natural pollinator populations.
In the operating room and across the Medical Center’s facilities, sustainability is also a focus, with the organization participating in multiple international efforts to repurpose outdated furniture and durable medical equipment for use in disadvantaged or at-risk regions of the world. From March 2022 to February 2023, the Medical Center donated 20,885 pounds of durable medical equipment and supplies to countries in need, said Imrie.
Working with a consultant, the hospital’s donations flow to small organizations across the world such as: Well Being, Living Well (Congo), Renewed Life Philippine Mission (the Philippines), Spread Aloha to the World (Vietnam and Nicaragua), Green Across the World (Senegal), and Dpto Medico Cuerpo de Bomberos (Santa Domingo) — as well as larger international aid organizations like MedShare and Partners for World Health.
In collaboration with Partners for World Health, the Medical Center also focuses on diverting opened-but-unused medical items and equipment from landfills and sending them instead to countries in need. In 2022, the hospital donated nearly 15 tons of items and equipment, including sending six pallets of furniture and medical equipment to the Ukraine in March of 2022.
The focus on efficiency also extends to the Medical Center’s energy control systems and waste processing. In 2022 the hospital upgraded control systems in two aging areas of its facilities from pneumatic to digital controls, eliminating the energy-intensive compressed air control system and creating central monitoring and fault detection systems for medical equipment, allowing the facilities team to identify equipment issues and failures before they result in energy inefficiencies or operational issues.
An Ongoing Commitment to Achieving Environmental Stability
Programs devoted to serving healthy food, reducing waste and limiting the use of chemicals have earned the Medical Center a perennial spot among national leaders in sustainable health care. Since 2009 the Medical Center has been a recurring recipient of Practice Greenhealth’s prestigious Top 25 Environmental Excellence Award, which recognizes the top green hospitals in the country. Since 2015 the Medical Center’s Fanny Allen campus has also won the organization’s Emerald Award, which honors outstanding achievements and continuous improvement around sustainable operations.
“In a shifting health care landscape, a focus on sustainability can help build resilience while better protecting the health of patients and the community,” said Gary Cohen, Practice Greenhealth founder. “The University of Vermont Medical Center demonstrates the kind of leadership, innovation, and performance that can drive the entire health sector toward more environmentally responsible practices.”
About the University of Vermont Medical Center
The University of Vermont Medical Center is a 499-bed tertiary care regional referral center providing advanced care to approximately 1 million residents in Vermont and northern New York. Together with our partners at the Larner College of Medicine at the University of Vermont and the College of Nursing and Health Sciences, we are Vermont’s academic medical center. The University of Vermont Medical Center also serves as a community hospital for approximately 150,000 residents in Chittenden and Grand Isle counties.
The University of Vermont Medical Center is a member of The University of Vermont Health Network, an integrated system established to deliver high quality academic medicine to every community we serve.
Source: 6.2.2023. BURLINGTON, Vt. – UVM Medical Center
