By Alex Costello
What they might not expect, but what they will get, is treatment in a "green" facility.
No, the hospital has not been repainted. Rather, it has initiated a new program: Project Green. Headed up by the Green Team, the goal of Project Green is to make the hospital a more environmentally friendly facility. And the Green Team, a group of the hospital's department heads, does this by researching new ways the facility can be more environmentally friendly.
"We view our mission, obviously, as providing health care to the communities that we serve," said Joseph Quagliata, president and CEO of SNCH. "And it's obvious that an extension of good health is conserving the resources that we all cherish on this planet. So what we're attempting to do is to much more formally engage the 2,400 people or so that work across our enterprise to get on board and understand how we can all better contribute to that process."
To that end, the hospital will officially kick off Project Green on Thursday. Some of the policies being implemented are already in effect in parts of the hospital and are now just being made official. Others are completely new.
"I always felt the need to recycle and try and be more environmentally sound," said the facility's executive chef, Stephen Bello. "And I thought that it would be a great idea to start it in my department. And after meeting with my chief operating officer ... he asked me to champion it throughout the entire organization."
Bello, the head of the Green Team, helped to spearhead all of the new initiatives in the hospital. One of the largest is the implementation of a purified water system instead of bottled water. Bello's department alone was spending $8,500 a year on bottled water.
"We've cut that down where we're spending less than $1,000 because we're doing a filtered water system," he said. "Now what we're doing is evaluating many of the off-sites as far as how much money they're spending in bottle watered, and the employee to come pick it up, and the fuel to get it there, and transforming into this purified water system."
In addition to greatly reducing its bottled water usage, the hospital has implemented a Green Mug program. Employees can buy a green mug for $2 and use it when they get drinks from the cafeteria, instead of paper cups. Doing this not only reduces waste, but saves the hospital money on the cups and saves employees 15 cents on every purchase.
Delivery pallets and shrink-wrap, things that used to be thrown out, are now being recycled. In addition, more paper, cardboard and plastic will be recycled. And the hospital is looking to conserve more gas, oil, and electricity. It is also looking into green cleaning products, provided that they do an adequate job.
Green principles are not entirely new to SNCH. When the hospital opened a new wing in 2006, it incorporated many green building techniques into the design.
"Our primary mission, obviously, is to provide the highest level of patient care or meet patients' expectations relative to the kind of care that they get," said Quagliata. "We would never do or incorporate anything that would compromise the outcome of a patient."
The head of the hospital's Green Team explained the benefits of the new initiative. "When a hospital is environmentally sound, employees feel better and perform better," said Bello. "Because they're working for an organization that takes ownership in the future of the environment, the future of their employees, their employees' children, etc. There's serious validity to that."
Comments about this story? ACostello@ liherald.com or (516) 569-4000 ext. 207.
