Giving hope and comfort to all those who suffer and stay in hospital, to their families and carers, by offering them art: this is the mission set by the Foundation for Art in Hospitals, created in 1984 in the United States, which offers works of art to hospitals free of charge. The foundation's raison d'être is to make hospitals around the world beautiful places of healing.
Nature to "take patients out of their hospital and pathological context".
Creating links, supporting patients in a new way, promoting a plant heritage linked to therapeutic themes: these are the aims of an original ethnobotanical trail created as part of a partnership between the Hôpital d'Instruction des Armées Robert Picqué in Villenave d'Ornon (33) and INRA Bordeaux-Aquitaine. The site and report can be viewed via a link in this article.
London hospitals pool their warehouses
In the UK, the National Health Service (NHS) is one of England's largest employers and a major purchaser of goods and services, with a correspondingly huge carbon footprint of 18 million tonnes of CO2 per year. It has set itself an ambitious target: to reduce carbon emissions by 26% by 2020, by 80% by 2050 and, in the shorter term, by 10% from 2007 levels by 2015.
Interview with Marion Jaros, Office for Environmental Protection of the City of Vienna, Austria
Read the interview with Marion Jaros, representative of the Office for Environmental Protection of the City of Vienna in Austria. She tells us about the ÖkoKauf Wien sustainable purchasing program, which has created a database on disinfectants.
Good initiatives to reduce waste
Since 2008, C2DS has been investigating the contents of the boxes distributed in maternity wards, as the baby cosmetics samples offered may contain substances of concern. The Alès hospital and the Blois Polyclinic, among others, have also been concerned by another aspect of these maternity kits: the waste they generate.