Sarah Bush Lincoln Health Center
Mattoon, Illinois
Jacob Hassan
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Sarah Bush Lincoln Health Center (SBLHC) is a non-for-profit hospital
located in Mattoon, Illinois. This 410,000 square foot facility was built
in 1977 as a joint project between the Mattoon and Charleston Communities.
Today, Sarah Bush employees over 1,700 (including the outlying clinics)
and continues to provide healthcare services to outlying counties with
11 satellite clinics.
Result:
- A waste audit revealed that the hospital has the potential to save
$34,114.50 per year by recycling every recyclable item in the trash.
This included tin cans and food waste from the cafeteria as well as
office paper, plastic, Styrofoam, aluminum and glass.
The food waste could be diverted from the hospital’s solid waste
stream by the use of vermi-composting, which is the process of using
red worms to convert food waste into a usable organic fertilizer. The
Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity has been contacted for
grant funding of this project.
- The hospital could save $51,000 per year by replacing the disposable
chair check pads with reusable chair check pads. Chair check pad are
electronic devices, which are placed on wheel chairs and hospital beds
that notifies a nurse of a patient’s movement out of a chair or
bed. The hospital instituted the use of these pads to prevent lawsuits
from patients that fall during their stay.
- Purchasing autoclavable bedpans is a feasible option to disposable
bedpans. The purchase of these bedpans would have a one time cost of
$1200, which is less than half the current amount spent on bedpans.
Presently there is not enough manpower to autoclave the bedpans.
- It would cost the hospital about $130,000 to convert over 3260 fluorescent
fixtures from T12 lights with magnetic ballasts to T8 with electronic
ballasts. This would save them $53,000 annually with a payback of 2.5
years.
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