Climate & Environment

Reducing Hospitals’ Carbon Footprints

Published

3 years ago

February 24, 2021

The commissioner noted that the state was working to ensure that hospitals reduced their carbon footprints, keeping them running on low energy.

He said, “We are trying to keep the hospitals on low energy and low carbon footprints; we don’t want the Medical Directors to spend their IGR on diesel and fueling Generators.

“So, where we can cool a building down naturally and use renewable energy like solar or natural ventilators or inverters, we would do that just to bring down the carbon footprints of all our medical infrastructure and reduce the use of fossil fuel and generally, redesign the building or rehabilitate it to be a lot cooler, among others.

“With the ongoing refurbishment and roll out of the Governor’s medical infrastructure blueprint, the medical infrastructure landscape of the State would look completely different. Our attention would focus on maintenance because there is no point coming in doing a deep refurbishment only to allow it to disintegrate afterwards.

“Once we have done a deep refurbishment, we have an agency that is responsible for maintenance and they are part of the refurbishment strategy and once we finish, then we are going to have what we call a maintenance culture to make sure the infrastructure does not suffer dilapidation due to neglect.

“All the engineers on-site would focus on maintenance and LASIAMA would come in and set up a facility the management programme and make sure the deep refurbishment done is adequately maintained.”