Cardinal Health Becomes Founding Partner of National Effort to 'Green' Operating Rooms

Cardinal Health announces that it has joined the group of founding corporate sponsors supporting the Practice Greenhealth Greening the Operating Room (GOR) Initiative, which aims to reduce the environmental footprint of operating suites in hospitals across the country.

"With its GOR Initiative, Practice Greenhealth is bringing together the forward-thinking stakeholders in the health care supply chain to provide guidance that can help hospitals utilize operating room resources more effectively and reduce the volume of waste generated ther e," says Marc Mullen, senior vice president and general manager of Presource® at Cardinal Health.

The Practice Greenhealth initiative aligns well with the Cardinal Health Environmental Sustainability Guiding Principles around energy efficiency, use and sourcing; pollution prevention; and design for environment.

In addition, Cardinal Health through its partnership with SRI/Surgical Express, Inc. led the industry with the introduction of its Hybrid Preference Pack, the first sustainable surgical kitting solution that combines reusable and disposable surgical items into a single kit. With the GOR collaboration, Cardinal Health is furthering its support for the environment through efforts to make hospital operating rooms more efficient and environmentally sustainable.

Cardinal Health can also help reduce the amount of packaging used for and waste generated with surgical procedures through its Presource® Procedure Packs, which cons olidate individual supplies into procedure-specific kits. The customized kits further help decrease waste by decreasing the number of unused items in a procedure.

"Our support for the Greening the OR initiative not only underscores our commitment to environmental sustainability in health care as a whole, but it also marks our dedication to helping our customers achieve their sustainability goals," said Brodie Bauders, vice president of Channel Development at Cardinal Health. "It has been suggested that operating suites in hospitals can produce as much as 20 percent to 30 percent of a hospitals total waste, so we think initiatives like this are critical to helping hospitals reduce waste and increase efficiencies."

In addition to its founding partner role with Project Greenhealth, Cardinal Health is included in the Dow Jones Sustainability North America Index, one of the most highly recognized and long-standing global sustainability indices. It is also a past reci pient of the Illinois Governors Pollution Prevention Award for a division-wide packaging reduction effort that eliminated more than 3 million pounds of packaging over a five-year period.