Greening Hospitals: One Doctor’s Efforts
Dr. Ravi Gupta thinks hospitals need to become a lot more environmentally friendly.
Hospitals and outpatient practices use a lot of energy and waste a lot of materials. Doctors tend to be focused on patient care rather than caring for the environment. Hopefully, that is starting to change.
Dr. Gupta, a physician practicing hospital medicine in Virginia, had been so bothered by the lack of an environmental policy at the his job that he did something: he developed and a plan to make the hospital system where he works greener and he helped implement it.
My son was born with a congenital heart defect, which thrust my green living family into the not-so-green world of Western medicine. We were blessed to have a natural home birth assisted by caring midwives before entering the world of surgeons and intensive care. Throughout this process, including our most recent stay in the hospital, I have looked for ways to make the experience greener, and to minimize the toxins my son 
