Webinar 3: Building the Bridge Between Quality Improvement and Sustainability

Thanks again to Janet Howard of Healthier Hospitals Initiative and Blair Sadler, IHI Senior Fellow, for presenting with me the third and final session of our webinar series on 27 March 2014.  We reviewed the data assignments--modeling gas use of a hospital and electricity use of a school-- introduced the use of daily and 15-minute energy data to analyze facility performance, and summarized the case for quality improvement methods in energy management. We had 40 registrants and good follow-up questions.

Here is the link to the pdf of the slides.   The HHI site has audio of the presentation as well, click here.

Our initial construction feels to me like the footbridge in the photo, not yet substantial and not ready to bear heavy traffic.  Still, we've made a little progress. 

We need to do more, of course.  Blair emphasized that unsustainable operations are a health issue.  He recalled the perspective that Jeff Rich offered in Jeff's introduction to comprehensive work at Gundersen Health (webinar 1):  health care organizations have an ethical obligation to run operations in a way that at least does no harm to our communities.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change outlined the challenges to human communities on 31 March with the release of Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability.   Chapter 11 of the report, Human Health:  Impacts, Adaptation, and Co-Benefits  discusses both near-term pollution effects and longer term effects of climate change on human health.

I keep returning to George Box’s advice:  we have to learn fast in the face of environmental changes underway--both to mitigate impact and adapt to what appear to be inevitable changes.  I’m convinced that we can apply the methods of quality improvement to speed our learning.