Thirteen bedside carts containing the supplies nurses most frequently use for patient care is the key to over a quarter million dollars in savings for Delta Hospital annually. The carts are the brainchild of Amy Setterstrom, a Green+Leader and registered nurse at Delta Hospital.
Amy is a coordinator for the Releasing Time to Care program, which empowers staff to increase the time for direct patient care through innovative solutions. With the onset of Covid-19, Amy noticed the waste that was created by the need to don new personal protective equipment (PPE) each time a nurse left a patient’s bedside to retrieve supplies.
She asked, How might nurses reduce waste, save time, and increase infection control? The answer was to bring supplies to the patient’s bedside. Amy enlisted her colleagues at Delta Hospital and in Fraser Health to deliver the pilot with seed funding from the Energy and Environmental Sustainability (EES) team. She credits Shad at Forsyth Healthcare with finding a suitable cart to use for the trial in the ER, as well as several others who provided support and direction throughout.
The initial success of the pilot motivated Amy’s project team to pursue funding to purchase more carts. In order to make a case to the Delta Hospital and Community Health Foundation (DHCHF), they tracked how much waste was reduced through use of the “sustainability carts,” monitoring the bedside day after day. Though data collection isn’t Amy’s forté, she connected with the EES & Innovation Grants Teams, who kept her on track and motivated.
The team effort definitely paid off. They discovered that the project could result in approximately $256,000 in savings for the hospital annually, if 13 carts were purchased. “The most rewarding part of the project was coming up with my final calculation,” says Amy. “I couldn’t believe how big the amount was, but the data was black and white.”
Recognizing the value, DHCHF eagerly invested in the project to serve the acute ER at Delta Hospital. Now that the carts have arrived, Amy is ready for the larger project roll out. “The carts are here, so the next step is getting the carts loaded, labelled and at the bedside.”
Small steps can have big impacts. Amy is a shining example of how Green+Leaders make a difference for patients and through their care for the environment, and vice versa. Being empowered to lead has made all the difference for her and the Delta Hospital community.
