Reduction of Ecological Footprint at Hotel Dieu Hospital
Hotel Dieu Hospital is the ambulatory care teaching hospital for Kingston and the surrounding area. It provides outpatient
paediatrics, ophthalmology, diabetes education, breast assessment, day surgery, urgent care and mental health programs to more than 500 000 people in the region.
As part of an energy retrofit, Hotel Dieu Hospital partnered with APSC100 to look at various ways to reduce their ecological footprint. Five different projects were created:
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Hotel Dieu Hospital biomedical technologist Ken Robertson (back left) led a tour of an operating room for Queen's students investigating ways to recover anaesthetic gases. Learning how an anaesthesiology machine works are Laura Towsley (front left), Brianne Overton (back right) and Regan Sullivan (front right) |
- Alternative Power Sources
- Anaesthetic Gas Recovery
- Green Roof Feasibility
- Waste Reduction
- Water Conservation
This set of 5 projects had over 100 students over the past year working towards making Hotel Dieu Hospital's operations greener.
As a part of their project, each team visited Hotel Dieu Hospital to determine the scope of their problem and speak with appropriate hospital representatives.
In the picture on the right , one of the Anaesthetic Gas Recovery teams is given a tour of an operating room.
Below, the circuit of a device designed to monitor toilet flushes is shown. Based on their findings, the students designed a plan to significantly reduce water wastage in hospital washrooms.
The team responsible for water conservation at faucets designed and constructed a device to monitor water flow through a tap, as featured below. From their results, they were able to recommend replacement faucets which would lead to significant savings.
"We're delighted to have the Queen's students contributing to our efforts at Hotel Dieu to go easier on the planet," said architect Debra Krakow, one of the main partners at the hospital. "It gives these future engineers a hands-on opportunity to see how their work affects a community, and also to experience what it's like to partner with a community institution to create a successful outcome."
These projects were featured in the October 2007 edition of Update - Hotel Dieu Hospital's newsletter and on the Applied Science News website. The article can be found here.
