OR going Green?

[mactheknife]

So our hospital wants to go green. Any helpful ideas for OR Staff. We need all your advice pleasse

[MsLeylaBar]

The hospital will have to invest in supplying all kinds of bins. A green committee was established in our OR probably 2 years ago and these people initiated everything from tracking down how much the OR saves while doing this, to doing a trial in 2 OR rooms at a time and then going all out. There's really some serious what we jokingly call "hippie green nazi" people in our OR who reprimands you when you throw something in the wrong bin.

Anyway, we all got used to it, your OR rooms will get crowded with so many different kinds of bins. Anything that you get from opening a certain supply to the field that you normally would just throw in the garbage, you have to sort out, anything recyclable you throw in the blue bin. We also have a separate blue bin for any paper that has patient info on it so it goes to the shredder. There also 2 kinds of bins that anesthesia has established to throw vials of medications. I can't remember all medications but anything with Epi, we have to throw it in the black bin. There is also a separate one for just the blue wraps. In the OR lounge, there's a blue bin for recyclables, there's a green bin for stuff that go to compost.

It sounds crazy but people get used to it. It becomes second nature.

[ChristineAdrianaRN, BSN, RN]

We do a lot of recycling as well. A lot of things, like the bovies and the coblators, get reprocessed. Other things, like the light handles, get recycled. We send them down with our dirty cart to sterile processing and they take care of it. We also have a bin for empty saline bottles.

A new initiative has been to have "dye-free" beige sterile towels instead of blue ones. I'm not sure how that has added to being "green"...it just seems to confuse and tick off the surgeons, ha.