Environmental impact and cost savings of operating room quality improvement initiatives: A scoping review (30 November 2022)

Summary

Operating rooms are major contributors to a hospital’s carbon footprint due to the large volumes of resources consumed and waste produced. The objective of this study from Sullivan et al., published in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons, was to identify quality improvement initiatives that aimed to reduce environmental impact of the operating room while decreasing costs.

Content

The authors conducted a literature search to identify quality improvement initiatives that aimed to decrease the environmental impact of the operating room while reducing costs.

Data were included from 23 unique quality improvement initiatives that described 28 interventions. Eleven (39.3%), eight (28.6%), three (10.7%), and six (21.4%) interventions, respectively, were categorised as refuse, reduce, reuse and recycle. The researchers found that the potential annual cost savings varied from $2,233 (intervention: transition to a waterless surgical scrub; environmental impact: 2.7 million litre of water saved annually) to $694,141 (intervention: education to reduce regulated medical waste; environmental impact: 30% reduction in regulated medical waste), although the methods of measuring environmental impact and cost savings varied considerably among studies.

"The opportunity to reduce our carbon footprint falls squarely on us, and I see surgeons taking a prominent role in leading efforts, not just locally with their green implementation teams, but in setting national standards and policies that will move this effort forward for an overall sustainable way of approaching health care delivery," a coauthor said in a statement.