Sustainable practices in hospital and operating theaters

This review aims to provide an update on the results of studies published in the last two years involving the development of sustainable practices in hospital and operating theaters (OT).

Recently, many studies evaluated various initiatives to better understand the environmental impact of the OT but also to minimize its environmental impact. Many trials evidenced the positive impact of the instrument's reuse using an appropriate reprocessing procedure. Better waste segregation is associated with a reduction of produced waste and contributes to a significant reduction in CO 2 equivalent emissions. Regarding anaesthetic gas, Desflurane is known to have the worst environmental impact and the majority of the study evidenced that its reduction permits to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emission of the OT.

Greening the OT necessitates climate-smart actions such as waste reduction, the improvement of reusable instruments, recycling of our waste and better anaesthetic gas management. Within the last two years, many efforts have been made to reduce and better segregate waste produced in the OT and also to better understand the environmental impact of disposable and reusable devices.