The EPP Team
An EPP team is formed by hospital professionals from different areas working together to foster a new purchasing culture. This team coordinates its activities with the facility-wide environmental team and the product review committee(s). The leader of the team should be someone whose administrative responsibilities include ensuring that the EPP Project is fully implemented.
Why is an EPP team necessary?
The diverse perspectives of members from various departments can challenge current practice and promote innovative solutions.
If each department is part of the process, there will be greater buy-in to changes in practices and products.
A dedicated team can motivate Purchasing and other departments to implement environmentally preferable purchasing. Facility-wide environmental staff may not have the necessary skills and experience related to contracting. In addition, they may be so busy dealing with downstream environmental issues – waste, hazardous materials, compliance – that they don’t have the time or energy to implement environmentally preferable purchasing to establish upstream controls on waste and toxic exposures.
Establishing a separate committee is not the only way to go. Some hospitals may find that their existing product review committee is sufficiently interested in environmental improvements that they can serve as an EPP team by adding environmental criteria to their review of product attributes. Others may find that the facility-wide environmental team is interested in EPP as a part of their overall strategy and can address EPP issues in communication with Purchasing or Materials Management.
EPP is a STRATEGY to address issues you need to deal with – occupational exposures, waste volumes and costs, environmental compliance issues – so it can be a way for an existing purchasing or environmental committee to accomplish its goals, not an additional task unrelated to their current work.
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Who should the EPP team include?
Whatever staff team addresses environmental purchasing should include:
- representation from departments that use the products/services you want to address
- someone with upper management responsibility
- people who have a passion for the environmental focus of the team
Membership may include:
- Communication/Public Relations
- Environmental (Ecology) Team
- Facilities Operations (Physical plant, operations, logistics, and security)
- Financial Services (Accounting)
- Group Purchasing Organization (GPO) representation
- Materials Management (purchasing, contracting and distribution services)
- Waste Management / Housekeeping
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What should the EPP team do?
The EPP team should:
- Brainstorm possible EPP product categories
- Prioritize product categories based on existing problems, severity of impact, possible cost savings
- Review environmentally preferable product specifications on GPO contracts for possible use
- Research product specifications successfully used by others, and certification organizations that can vouch for product performance and preferability
- Develop additional/alternative specifications for products not on GPO contract, or where GPO specs are insufficient
- Develop and monitor product pilots
- Promote EPP’s benefits throughout your organization
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Practice Greenhealth thanks its EPP Program supporters for their contributions to the creation of these resources.
    
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