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eCritCare PodcastAuthor: Swapnil Pawar
The landscape of Intensive care is changing. In the era of evidence based medicine, we try to make best possible decision for our patients based on best available evidence. Every fortnight, Dr Swapnil Pawar & Dr Jose Chacko will bring you one hot topic in Critical care. If you want to stay up to date with recent evidence or learn how to critically evaluate the literature in critical care, this podcast is for you. Language: en Genres: Education, Health & Fitness, Medicine Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
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#Epi 133 - The Green ICU: Cutting the Environmental Footprint of Intensive Care with Dr Nicole Hunfeld
Episode 133
Monday, 5 October, 2026
More than one box of gloves per patient, per day. Glass bottles of IV paracetamol filling the waste room. Intensive care saves lives, but at what cost to the planet? In this episode of the eCritCare Podcast, Dr Swapnil Pawar is joined by Dr Nicole Hunfeld, ICU pharmacist and Chief Sustainability Officer at Erasmus University Medical Centre, Rotterdam, associate professor in sustainable healthcare, chair of the Dutch Green ICU Network and co-chair of the ESICM Environmental Sustainability Committee. Nicole shares how a COVID-era frustration became the Green ICU movement, now spread across all 70 ICUs in the Netherlands and beyond. In this conversation: How overflowing plastic waste during COVID sparked the Green ICU project The material flow hotspot analysis, published in Intensive Care Medicine, that gave the team data and a narrative 108 gloves per patient per day, and the journey of a single nitrile glove from Spain to Malaysia to Rotterdam Low hanging fruit: swapping blueys for towels, the "No risk, no glove" campaign, and IV to oral switches Why the paper recycling idea failed completely, and what it taught the team about going slow The paracetamol challenge: a giant tablet, 40 hospitals signing up in one day, and around 18,000 euros saved in a year on one drug Measuring what matters: carbon, cost and nurse workload Building a national network with a mixed nurse and intensivist committee Keeping momentum: green leaf icons in protocols and "oral first" prompts in the EHR Corporate anthropology and why you should embrace the no Where to start in your own ICU Read this episode on Substack: https://critcareedu.substack.com/p/green-icu-sustainable-intensive-care Please send us your feedback @ icuprimaryprepcast@gmail.com
