Local
Perspectives:
The Green Health Center Project Awareness is growing
that the environmental impact of health services is significant and that promoting
health and saving lives must be balanced against harm to the environment.
The Green Health Center project (GHC), funded by the Greenwall Foundation, is
an exploration of the ethical principles involved in establishing this balance.
Drs. Andrew Jameton and Jessica Pierce, from the Department of Preventive and
Societal Medicine at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, have formed an
interdisciplinary working group of scholars to develop the concept of a “green
health center.” The GHC concept is grounded on several assumptions:
- The health of earth’s ecosystem is a necessary basis for human well-being;
therefore, our pursuit of health should not undermine its viability.
- Society
has an obligation to minimize its environmental impact in order to protect the
health and welfare of present and future human generations and show respect for
non-human creatures.
- If the US is to limit environmental costs generally,
it must limit health care environmental costs.
- Finally, there is reason
to think that high levels of public health can be maintained while dramatically
reducing the environmental impact of health care.
The main ethical
issues being addressed in the GHC project are: - How should health care
environmental costs be categorized in order to analyze the ethics of allocation?
- How should environmental costs be evaluated in relationship to human
health, life-saving, and reduction of suffering? What weight should future generations
and the abundance of nature have?
- What level of environmental cost reduction
in health care services should be sought?
- By what administrative methods
can costs ethically be limited? Establishing a global budget, eliminating high-cost
procedures, green purchasing, reducing waste, or queuing?
- Should patients
and staff of the GHC bear greater personal responsibilities for maintaining healthy
and environmentally sound lifestyles than clients of standard health care services?
- Is
the concept of a GHC a fair one? Or, does it discriminate against high-cost technology-dependent
patients?
- The participants in the GHC project hope to promote public discussion
of environmentally responsible health care and to stimulate more widespread research,
policy making, and institutional innovation regarding environmentally and ethically
sound health services.
For more information about the GHC,
contact Jessica Pierce (jpierce@unmc.edu;
402-559-7584) or Andrew Jameton (ajameton@
unmc.edu; or (402) 559-4860). Jessica Pierce,
PhD
Assistant Professor, Department of Preventive and Societal Medicine
University of Nebraska Medical Center
Omaha, NE USA |
