FEATURE Dr Paul Cooper Ph.D (Biochemistry) Industry Director, Health and Human Service, SMS Management & Technology Member AICD, Dep Chair Australian Information Industry Association (Vic) pcooper@smsmt.com
Leaning towards sustainability INTRODUCTION It’s now clear that in an effort to appear green, many organisations are trying to paint over poor business processes – a practice known as “green-washing”. This is a shame because it’s increasingly clear that true sustainability-oriented practices provide tangible long-term benefits for organisations as well as being good for the environment. To help give some dimensions to one aspect – let’s look firstly just at waste management in healthcare. A recent Victorian Government finding1 estimated that waste management costs in the Victorian healthcare setting are around $90M per annum. The report also stated that ”senior management levels at some sites were not aware of the high costs of general and clinical waste management and the financial savings that can be made from ensuring correct waste separation, increased recycling and waste reduction; environmental successes made by reducing waste and increasing recycling are not widely acknowledged and or promoted; and up to 40 different departments are responsible for waste management.” This conclusion is undoubtedly true of other jurisdictions. In a healthcare setting there is also the potential benefit of improved health outcomes for people in an optimum environmental setting. Putting all these improved sustainability practices together can provide tangible benefits such as cost savings, improved well-being and reduced environmental impact. In the USA there is at least one index2 attempting to measure hospitals by a Green Index of 12 criteria including physical site location, waste reduction, energy and air pollution, materials and resources. But given that many of our healthcare practices and hospitals have been in place for many years, what benefits might realistically be achievable for the healthcare sector in Australia today? This was the question put to a forum of our consultants recently. In response, our consultants recommended that the improvement practices developed in other sectors including the corporate sector could be usefully applied to the health sector. A key approach that originated in the manufacturing sector is known as Lean/Six Sigma. Lean was developed by the car-maker Toyota in an effort to reduce waste in seven major categories. In more recent times, Lean has been combined with Six Sigma process improvement which concentrates on reducing process variance. Combined together, Lean/Six Sigma is becoming widely accepted as an effective process improvement and waste reduction management approach – well beyond the manufacturing sector where it began.
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HOW CAN LEAN/SIX SIGMA WORK TO IMPROVE SUSTAINABILITY PRACTICES? In fact, it is pleasing that the health sector has embraced the Lean/Six Sigma process improvement practices with a noteworthy degree of interest. This adoption of Lean/Six Sigma suggests that building upon this approach in a holistic manner to further incorporate improvements in waste and energy management in addition to the patient flow improvements that are a frequent target, could be helpful in building a sustainable healthcare approach. The use of Lean/Six Sigma might thereby help achieve the twin benefits of greener hospitals that also have reduced running costs and better health outcomes (e.g. through improved patient flow and lower error rates.) It is our belief that many organisations, and most particularly the health and human services sector would benefit from any sustainability initiatives being considered in the context of overall process improvement approaches. After all, the Lean approach considers process improvement from the point of view of waste elimination – primarily from the perspective of wasted time and effort to be sure – but it is not a large leap from that thinking to the more direct and tangible waste aspects associated with supply chains, and actual physical waste disposal processes and carbon and energy footprint reduction. Efforts to improve work processes that result in better business practices also have a resultant flow-through of reduced consumption of supplies and reduced waste.
ENGAGE GREEN TECHNOLOGY TO ASSIST Some practical ideas that help in sustainability include the use of low-energy lighting (with proximity sensors), and better environmental management systems using advanced heating, cooling and air recirculation systems for buildings. However, consider enlisting the Information Technology department as well: they can also assist in the drive to improved sustainability. With manufacturers creating low energy servers and desktops, there is an emerging opportunity to change over some or all of your computers towards more energy efficient devices. There’s also a technology called virtualisation that is proving helpful: virtualisation is where today’s powerful hardware is enabled to run several instances of software so that its utilisation is increased and made considerably more efficient. Virtualisation of servers also has the benefit of enabling easier migration of servers from one physical location to another. This is a key requirement in relocating an IT environment in the event of a physical issue (power failure, fire, flood, etc).