Carbon Footprinting: A Guide for Hospitalists-Presentation

Video Transcription

Video Summary

Katie Liu, a MedPeds-trained adult hospitalist, presents on carbon footprinting for hospitalists, focusing on practical approaches to measuring and reducing healthcare environmental impact without compromising care quality. She explains the three scopes of healthcare emissions: Scope 1 (direct emissions), Scope 2 (purchased electricity), and Scope 3 (indirect supply chain emissions), emphasizing hospitals as major contributors. Using life cycle assessments (LCA), she outlines six key steps for calculating carbon footprints: defining scope and boundaries, inventorying resource use, sourcing emissions data, tallying, interpreting results, and determining next steps.<br /><br />Two case studies illustrate these methods: one at NYU Langone Hospital assessing unit-level emissions including energy, food, and supplies; another evaluating unnecessary blood work at Vancouver General Hospital, linking environmental impacts to improving care value. She highlights the challenges of data limitations, uncertainty, and generalizability, advocating for consistent data use and equitable sustainability efforts that consider healthcare quality and access.<br /><br />Liu underscores the importance of integrating carbon footprinting into quality improvement and advocating for policy changes, citing Massachusetts' mandate for hospital emissions reporting. She directs hospitalists to resources like EcoInvent, OpenLCA, EPA databases, and Practice GreenHealth to support environmental sustainability initiatives aimed at reducing healthcare's carbon footprint while maintaining patient care standards.

Keywords

carbon footprinting

hospitalists

healthcare emissions

life cycle assessment

sustainability in healthcare

quality improvement

environmental impact reduction