Nursing Sustainability by Design: On joining the sustainability team - the experience of a sceptic

We all know what it’s like, you feel you are bombarded with emails either requests to attend meetings, answer questions, reiterate information etc. and then there are the ones suggesting you may wish to attend events for your personal development or to improve your research involvement. What do we do…well mostly we delete however just occasionally one pops into that box that looks a little more interesting so you say to the team who is free who can go to this on our behalf and immediately wish you had kept quiet because it turns out you are the one with the gap in your diary. So be it I am delegated to attend a half study day/research day with the sustainability team where they are looking at sustainability in health. Immediate thoughts oh no why did I not delete that one!

Well the day arrives and I set off wondering what I have let myself in for. Some interesting people are there and discussions ensue about the use of lithium batteries in health care, we carry out some exercises designed to alert our brains to the fact that this resource is not going to last forever what exactly are we going to do about this. Suddenly it seems interesting after all, just what are we going to do, a random thought regarding replicating the use of Adenosine triphosphate (ATP) to fuel pacemakers’ escapes and I am hooked. No I have not designed a battery that utilises or replicates the actions of ATP (Can Brian Cox help please) but I have realised this is just the tip of the iceberg. Discussions continue…what can we think of that we should be concerned about. They say the simple things in life are best and my thoughts turn to just how much waste we generate not only in the real care environment but in the university and our clinical skills labs. Do we recycle, what do we recycle, could we do more, where does the waste go, how much does it cost, does it really matter? I had not given it a thought! Enter Janet Richardson and Jane Grose the gurus of sustainable waste. Should we and can we teach our students about this? Would they be interested….well that’s up to us surely to make it interesting and relevant.

Now of course being child team member, we like to think we are fairly inventive in our approach to teaching and we are always keen to say how things should be done! Children’s nurses are not renowned for being a quiet bunch. The task therefore was to engage our second year students in the sustainability agenda through, in this instance, teaching them about the limits of natural resources and waste management. Sounds pretty dry doesn’t it? Well no we made it an interactive skills session. So one of our skills stations became resource challenges and waste management e.g. where do we put the gauze why, where does it come from, will we always have cotton to make gauze, what happens if we don’t? What about plastic? What will we do when the oil runs out and we can no longer manufacture plastic for Intra Venous (IV) lines, for IV bags for anything really? How much does it cost for a bag of ordinary waste vs a bag of clinical waste to be disposed of? How much do we spend on disposing of waste in the wrong bags and what could we do with that money? The students really seem to get this, they can see the relevance they understand what we are saying and miracles they tell practice colleagues where they should be disposing of waste and why. As an added bonus some of the students become further involved with the whole project and go on to work with us with different projects, for example linking up with product Design Students. And all of this work has been recognised with a nomination for a Green Gown Award: http://www5.plymouth.ac.uk/news/tackling-the-issue-of-sustainability-in-health

Written by Janet Kelsey, Associate Professor (Senior Lecturer) Health Studies (Paediatric), School of Nursing and Midwifery, Plymouth University, October 2014