Green Surgery: Integrating Sustainability in Women’s Health Practices
As necessary as the medical industry is, it could have a small carbon footprint. Sustainability for hospitals, equipment manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, and more is a growing priority. Green surgery is a rising innovation that could change operations for the better. It is getting its introduction in obstetrics and gynecology, showing how women’s health can embrace sustainability in surgery.
What Is Green Surgery and its Impact on Women’s Health?
Green surgery aims to make surgical operations more environmentally friendly. These methods must balance providing patients with effective care at a reasonable price. The sustainable options must cost less or equal to conventional surgery techniques to become viable.
Exploratory research suggests that focusing on sustainability in surgery could enhance patient care and women’s health while helping the planet. How? Single-use implements are a staple. Consider the number of specula thrown out daily worldwide when stainless steel would deliver a reusable option. Additionally, this material would not have the chance to leech microplastics into women’s bodies.
Surgical operations for women also use tons of power and resources. Temperature and humidity are critical to balance during delicate procedures like hysterectomies or cesareans. It also wastes tons of medical assets, like anesthetic gases, which experts could recapture. Finally, a small percentage of waste generation contributes to most of the sector’s carbon footprint. It may include but is not limited to the following:
- Gloves
- Blue towels
- Disposable pads
- Implement packaging
- Vials
Letting electricity and trash escape facilities like this eventually harms all people, including women, by exposing them to stimuli in their daily lives, impacting their health.
How Can Obstetrics and Gynecology Providers Adopt Sustainable Practices?
People giving birth also are more likely to deliver children with low birth weights and congenital disabilities.
Additionally, increased air pollution and food contaminants expose women to numerous ailments that could follow potential children. Medical professionals need to recognize the links between climate change and degrading health in all, but people who identify as women or as a minority disproportionately suffer.
Therefore, private and public systems need to incorporate more green surgical expectations and sustainable care techniques for women. Patients and healthcare professionals share various responsibilities when alleviating their environmental footprint. These are some leading recommendations for how to make women’s care healthier and eco-friendly:
- Draw links between planetary health and women’s health.
- Sustainably source surgical care products with minimal packaging.
- Prepare to avoid urgent delivery requests and relying on intensive transportation.
- Develop more robust waste management systems for surgical and women’s health implements.
- Advocate to teach green surgical strategies in higher education.
- Find reusable, low-waste alternatives to processes like linen laundering, sterilization and equipment repair.
Offices may also examine how other sectors are making operations more sustainable. For example, many offices are using video-conferencing software to engage with clients. Women’s care offices would benefit from having surgical consultations or low-stakes visits virtually. This could increase access to reproductive prescriptions or expand breastfeeding support to those who may be unable to meet in person.
What Are the Integration Challenges and Ways to Improve?
Financial Constraints
More sustainable surgical and women’s health tools might be more expensive. Consider an ethically sourced ultrasound machine, complete with conflict-free and recycled metals. This may be expensive and hard to locate through normal supply chains.
Supply Chain Accessibility
Sourcing eco-friendly options for green surgery and sustainable women’s care might not be the norm for most suppliers. Package-free yet safe tools, reusable towels and more might be around in limited quantities.
Doctors would also need to put in additional effort to discover and establish contracts with these more eco-conscious suppliers, limiting practices further if they resist change. They must overcome this and support circular economic supply chain models to make green surgery commonplace and health care resilient against the climate crisis.
Regulatory Barriers Meets Education
Making these eco-friendly options a common practice could be a battle against compliance. Does the fine print allow hospitals or gynecologists to use reusable specula, or does this contradict a health and safety code?
A lack of education among health practitioners about frameworks could limit what sustainable practices they adopt. If stakeholders are misinformed about what is and is not permitted, then it could dissuade them from finding greener solutions.
Knowing modern regulatory standards is critical for identifying what is possible. Clinicians may consult compliance auditors to identify decarbonization and waste reduction opportunities to help their patients be healthier.
Sustainable Obstetrics and Gynecology
Women’s health care has been known for its waste generation, especially in the hygiene products industry. Surgery is not much better, but all these systems can be improved with sustainable techniques. Facilities and their stakeholders must consider transitioning to these patient care models to support equitable, greener women’s care in the future.