It’s not enough that radical environmentalists have gone after planes, trains, automobiles, the military and meat.
Now they’re entering hospital operating rooms. The latest morphing of radical environmentalists is to call out the places where the sickly go to heal and be healed as cesspools of pollution.
“Operating rooms are major contributors to a hospital’s carbon footprint due to the large volumes of resources consumed and waste produced,” one Journal of the American College of Surgeons abstract stated.
So here come some brainiac on-board-with-Greta-Thunberg-type-of-thinking surgeons with some so-called solutions to this carbon-tied peril.
“Twenty-three unique quality improvement initiatives describing 28 interventions were included” in the study, the surgeons wrote, in their “Environmental Impact and Cost Savings of Operating Room Quality Improvement Initiatives: A Scoping Review” report, published November 30.
What are they?
In the end — who cares?
If you’re a patient at a hospital facing emergency heart surgery, do you really care if your surgeon scrubbed in the waterless solution or in the more traditional flow from faucet method? Just because 2.7 million liters of water could be saved annually by using a waterless solution, resulting in an annual cost savings of $2,233 for the hospital facility — so what?
Just do the dang surgery. And do it right.
Nobody cares that $694,141 could be saved by reducing “regulated medical waste” either, or that doing so could lead to an “environmental impact” of “30% education in regulated medical waste,” as this report said. That sounds like a pencil-pusher’s entry aimed at justifying the need for the pencil-pusher’s paid position.
As for the patients, as for the people the hospitals are supposed to be in business for serving and assisting — nobody cares.
As a matter of fact, most patients facing surgery as well as their family members and loved ones would probably prefer their medical professionals to, say, go overboard on the hand-washing and overboard on throwing out of waste, so as to guarantee optimal patient safety and health. Did you wash your hands, doc? Go ahead — do it again; we don’t mind; we’ll wait.
“Surgeons, healthcare practitioners and administrators interested in environmental stewardship and working towards a culture of sustainability may consider … [these] quality improvement initiatives,” the study concluded.
Better yet: No.
Environmentalists have a reputation for putting trees and salamanders and carbon footprint concerns before humans. This study is proof of them doing just that.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter, @ckchumley. Listen to her podcast “Bold and Blunt” by clicking HERE. And never miss her column; subscribe to her newsletter and podcast by clicking HERE. Her latest book, “Lockdown: The Socialist Plan To Take Away Your Freedom,” is available by clicking HERE or clicking HERE or CLICKING HERE.
