Sentara Health recently transitioned the way it conducts certain CT scans across Virginia and North Carolina to reduce plastic waste.
Doctors use CT machines, or computerized tomography, to look for a variety of bodily abnormalities, such as tumors, bone fractures and coronary artery blockages.
“It's basically a fancy X-ray. The difference is the CT scan spins the X-ray tube around your body and basically slices you like a loaf of bread,” said Diane Bruce, supervisor of the CT and MRI departments at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital. “We can turn your anatomy up on its side and look at it slice by slice. A highly detailed image.”
At its 12 hospitals systemwide, Sentara performs more than half a million such scans each year. Many of those require injecting patients with contrast, a dye used to highlight certain anatomical pathways or organs.
Bruce said until recently, the process required several pieces of single-use plastic.
“We would have to load a very bulky syringe every single time we had to inject someone, attach a type of tubing every time we had to inject someone and use an individual bottle of saline and potentially an individual bottle of contrast,” she said.
The health system is now using injector machines that use bulk bottles of contrast and saline instead of smaller ones.
“My trash can doesn’t fill up in a day anymore,” Bruce said. “I only throw away one bit of tubing per patient. Everything else is whenever that bottle of contrast runs out,” which is typically after about five patients.
The prior single-use bottles held 100 ml of solution, but if technicians needed less than that, they’d have to throw out the rest. The new machines can pull the exact amount required, Bruce said.
The change does not eliminate plastic waste, but it does cut it down by about 78,000 pounds annually, Sentara estimates. The health system invested $1.58 million in the new machines.
It’s part of a wider sustainability program the organization launched a few years ago.
Last year, Sentara largely phased out an inhaled anesthetic gas called desflurane, a greenhouse gas that hospitals vent outdoors. Desflurane can linger for years and trap heat in the atmosphere at a rate more than 2,000 times greater than carbon dioxide.
Lisa Darger, director of sustainability, said Sentara’s goal is to improve the environment – which ultimately impacts human health – while also cutting costs.
“Being efficient is not only a good environmental thing, but it's also good financial stewardship,” she said.
The system has to balance environmental benefits with economics and patient outcomes, she said. “Sometimes it can be very challenging. (But) there are things you can do that are financially sound decisions as well as environmentally sound decisions.”
Switching to the bulk contrast injector machines for CT scans combines those objectives, Darger said. They cut plastic waste, but also reduce the hospitals’ annual disposal costs by nearly $900,000.
From a medical standpoint, they are also easier to use, Bruce said, saving a few minutes per patient.
