New Center for the Environment and Health launches at Massachusetts General Hospital

BOSTON – Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) has launched a new Center for the Environment and Health aimed at integrating sustainability into all aspects of the MGH mission – clinical care, education, research and community health – to advocate for and improve the environmental health of the hospital, as well as the health and well-being of the communities it serves.

“The health care sector is responsible for a substantial amount of environmental pollution and contributions to climate change,” says Jonathan E. Slutzman, MD, an MGH Emergency Department physician and the center’s director and medical director for environmental sustainability. “If the U.S. health care system were its own country, it would be the 13^th largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world – more than the entire United Kingdom. It is our moral imperative to safeguard and improve the health of our communities by addressing the environmental impact of our operations and clinical decision making.”

The new center is the latest step in the hospital’s decades-long commitment to supporting sustainability programs at every level of the institution. Currently, nearly 100% of the electricity MGH uses comes from renewable sources, and it participates in numerous waste reduction programs and strives to purchase primarily environmentally preferable products. The Center for the Environment and Health is one of many recent initiatives stemming from the MGH’s Sustainability Committee – created in 2019 and comprised of leaders from all areas of hospital operations – which identifies, reviews and launches short- and long-term improvement efforts.

“Climate change is an immediate threat to human health, and environmental pollution directly contributes to respiratory illness and kidney, cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases,” says Regina LaRocque, MD, MPH, a physician-researcher in the MGH Infectious Diseases Division and one of the center’s associate directors. “As a hospital, we have an obligation to address these issues through education, research and advocacy, and we also need to work hard to reduce our own environmental footprint.”

In its new Stewardship Plan, the center has outlined its major goals, including a commitment to ensuring that staff, patients and community members more fully understand the link between the climate, environment and human health. Research also will play a key role in the new center’s work, promoting the gathering of appropriate data, disseminating new knowledge and learning the best ways to approach environmental issues from a health care perspective.

A few immediate goals of the center are to:

- Complete an institutional environmental footprint assessment to improve performance. 

- Establish an ongoing Grand Rounds sereies to enable hospital experts, alongside worldwide leaders, to discuss, education and improve climate change, health and health care sustainability efforts.

- Eliminate DEHP-containing clinical care products. DEHP is a chemical added to many plastics        that may cause adverse health effects.

- Eliminate unnecessary antibiotics from the food the hospital serves and increase the fraction of      plant-based foods and meals on campus.

“For years we have looked at and implemented new ways to make our hospital more sustainable,” says Joan Shea, director of Nutrition and Food Services. “After installing two water dispensers in the cafeteria of our main campus, we reduced our purchasing of plastic bottles of spring water by 31,200 in 2020. In addition, we purchased 200,000 fewer straws after adding a new strawless cover to the cold beverage options at two of our coffee shop locations. We also composted 523 tons of organic waste from our cafeterias last year, bringing our total to 2,836 tons since the hospital introduced its composting program.”

The hospital’s Nutrition and Food Services staff also are working to introduce more plant-based and vegan menu options to its menus. Several other areas of the institution are continuing to examine and advance efforts to become more sustainable.

“We continue to look for opportunities within our supply chain to become better stewards of our environment, including; expanding our reprocessing program within our operating rooms and procedural areas, identifying and eliminating products that contain PVC and DEHP and working with our distributor to de-case and recycle all cardboard from inbound supplies,” says Ed Raeke, director of Materials Management. “Our next step in this journey will be to partner with our vendors to establish sustainability goals for manufacturing responsibly that will hopefully become the framework for all of our future business opportunities.”

In addition to looking inward at the hospital’s own opportunities to enact meaningful change, the center aims to engage members of the community in its efforts to advance environmental and human health.

“Beyond the important mission of making hospital operations more sustainable, our mission also encompasses encouraging our community in the health care sector to collect new data to add to the literature, to help us contribute to a trend that can inform others about what works best in this arena,” says Ann-Christine Duhaime, MD, a pediatric neurosurgeon at Mass General for Children and the center’s associate director for research and publication. “Additionally, our mission includes communicating to staff and patients clear data about what pro-environmental behaviors matter most in their lives outside of health care, both on the individual and collective scale.”

The center will host its first symposium on climate, the environment, and health, entitled “Climate Change: Our Healthcare System, Our Patients, and You” on Wednesday, May 26, at 8:30 am. The keynote address will be given by Renee Salas, MD, MPH, MS, a Mass General Emergency Department physician. The virtual event will be open to the public. Register here.

“After years of working to improve our environmental footprint and enhance our practices, we are proud to launch this dedicated center that will be the conduit to bettering our practices, our community and our planet,” says Peter L. Slavin, MD, MGH president.

For more information about the MGH Center for the Environment and Health, visit www.massgeneral.org/environment-and-health.

About the Mass General Center for the Environment and Health

The Mass General Center for the Environment and Health integrates sustainability into all aspects of the MGH mission in order to improve the environmental health of the hospital, as well as the health and wellbeing of the communities we serve. We achieve this through research into the human health impacts of pollution and how to deliver sustainable health care; education on climate change, environmental degradation, and health; advocacy for science-based environmental policy; and engineering more environmentally responsible hospital operations.

About the Massachusetts General Hospital
Massachusetts General Hospital, founded in 1811, is the original and largest teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. The MGH Research Institute conducts the largest hospital-based research program in the nation, with an annual research budget of more than $1 billion and comprises more than 8,500 researchers working across more than 30 institutes, centers and departments. In August 2020 the MGH was named #6 in the nation by U.S. News & World Report in its list of "America’s Best Hospitals."