theluckyfrog

It didn't. This has been routinely taught in healthcare education for decades, at least. I guess somebody just needed a really easy research question to meet a publication requirement.

Or at minimum, bar soap for hand and body washing.

Edit: You can also get solid dish soap that lasts a really long time.

I'm white, but I lived in a majority black city with a large amount of recent immigrants for years in my early 20s.

In my experience, which is obviously anecdotal, everybody did in fact do this. Often when I was telling stories to my POC friends, they interrupted me to ask the race of individuals in the stories.

So right off the bat, a lot of stuff gets wasted because people don't check if something is already in the patient's room before bringing in more of it, or in some cases if the patient even wants the item.

Lights are rarely turned off even in rooms that aren't being used currently. Taps are often left to run for extended periods of time, and it tends to take forever to get a leaky sink fixed.

Most hospitals still use styrofoam cups for all patient drinks, and it's treated as normal to bring patients a whole new water every time their ice melts instead of just telling them to drink the room temperature water and deal with it.

Hospital food is wasted in enormous quantities simply because it's not palatable and doesn't sit well, and hospital food tends to do a lot of sitting because patients or staff aren't ready at the time it is delivered.

Some hospitals use isolation gowns that can be laundered like the sheets and pillowcases, but many to most just use plastic gowns.

Idk about all hospitals, but mine has these huge foam wedges that are used to turn patients to prevent bed sores, and they're single patient items but there's no real reason they have to be. If we can sanitize pillows and mattresses to be reused (unless there is visible damage to the pillow), there's no reason we couldn't have wedges that are able to be sanitized.

Staff get into bad habits of throwing launderable items like towels and washcloths in the trash because it's easier.

Much of this could be improved with staff education and enforcement policies IF staff weren't so overwhelmed by excessive patient ratios and scheduling bullshit.

As far as the poor choices of materials, like plastic gowns and styrofoam cups, hospitals choose those items simply because they are cheaper.

I work in a hospital, too, and what bothers me is not just the waste, but what that setting says about the health of our entire society.

Very few of my patients have some kind of disease or injury that was simply inevitable. Some vast, vast, vast majority of illness in our society could be prevented, delayed or minimized through some combination of the following:

-Eliminating smoking, severely reducing alcohol and other substance use

-Improving the average person's diet and reducing excess calorie consumption

-Building more physical activity into the standard American lifestyle

-Improved work-life balance to minimize stress and improve sleep patterns

-Better antimicrobial stewardship

-Less air pollution, and to a lesser degree less water pollution

Some of the trash produced in healthcare is due to lax standards; a lot of it is also a necessary result of providing safe and effective care.

But at the end of the day, we shouldn't be HAVING to provide this amount of care. Even if we do acute care as well as humanly possible, we're failing by not preventing more of it from even needing to occur.

There are many ways hospitals could reduce waste without compromising patient safety. if it was considered a priority. I can start listing some if anybody's interested, but it's sort of a pipe dream as long as money is the number one driver of healthcare policy.

The brand I have is Meliora and I've been happy with it, but I haven't tried any others because the bar I have has lasted me over a year so far.

In my experience, the best way to use it is to take one of those little knob-shaped scrub brushes, a rag or a sponge, wet it, scrub it around on the top of the soap to make suds, and then use the brush, rag or sponge to wash your dish.

You do know this was a massive improvement from previous labor standards, right?

Yeah, if it can be washed then I reuse it.

Hospital food-- why is it so unhealthy and unappealing?

To be fair, it's hard to make food that appeals to the widest possible range of people and can be made in large batches and distributed over the course of >1 hr. I get that.

But there is no excuse for how unhealthy our offerings are. We serve pancakes and syrup and fruit cups to people with metabolic syndrome--sometimes outright diabetics. Our meals are low on fiber, low on healthy fat and the only real protein options are low quality mystery meat, reconstituted eggs or outright supplements.

I'm PT, but I occasionally spend a fair amount of my session just cajoling and pressuring patients to eat whatever the healthiest thing is on their tray, and explaining to them how protein and calories are necessary for wound healing so they have to eat even if the food is gross.

A lot of our older, confused or stubborn people genuinely backslide in their nutrition while they're staying with us. It's intolerable.

Well, it's mostly something that doctors and industries need to be practicing, not the common people.

But things that ordinary people can do to some extent include asking your doctor about topical options if they try to go straight to oral antibiotics for things like mild skin rashes, outer ear infections, or uncomplicated acne.

My statements here can't supplant actual medical judgement, but sometimes doctors believe that everybody wants the pills as a first line treatment and they get a little complacent. It can never hurt to just ask.

Aside from that, there's the old standard to avoid buying "antibacterial" hand and body soaps unless you have a specific health condition or profession that makes it necessary.

Eating less meat could in theory reduce the demand for agricultural antibiotics, if everybody got on it.

And in general, practicing good hygiene and prevention--can't need treatment for an infection you don't get. STI prevention, wearing flip flops if you go in public showers, cover your skin that will touch shared gym equipment, not sharing stuff like razors, staying home if you're sick, wash your hands before touching your mucous membranes, food safety, vaccination, etc.

You don't need to apologize to me, it's okay. There's plenty of legitimate reasons to hate Henry Ford.

I just have a bit of a thing for labor history because it's not taught well in this country and I think that's on purpose to keep workers from effectively strategizing.

Otherwise healthy obese people tend to have higher absolute strength than skinny people at the same level of fitness, but lower relative strength.

For example, at 116 lbs, I can deadlift just over my total bodyweight, and I don't even really work out besides some moderate occupational lifting.

I doubt a 250 lb female coworker of mine would be deadlifting more than her bodyweight, even if her 1RM is technically bigger than mine.

I do wish my 1RM was more a lot of the time, though I don't want to pack on pounds just to make it so. Really need to find the discipline to get back into lifting.

Be nice if people would just BUY LESS of it. That's the only real solution...

Just taking better care of our bodies and the environment would drastically reduce our collective need for health care (both personally and institutionally).

It's funny how solving any of our issues would help solve the other ones as well. Less consumption means less pollution, less pollution means less disease, less disease means less healthcare burden, less healthcare burden means less pollution. Less healthcare burden also means that an aging population would be less of a threat. Single payer healthcare would mean employers didn't have to shoulder the burden of employees' health costs, which could mean shorter work weeks and better work-life balance. Better work-life balance would mean less disease. And so on and so forth.

In my country, I feel like left-leaning people are the ones who understand all of these connections, and right-leaning people are the ones who can't put any of the picture together and therefore support choices that lock us into all our problems.

But even the left-leaning people are often passively part of the problem, because they don't act on all of the issues they acknowledge. They also get scared off talking about the ways that individuals can make a difference, because there's always someone who can't do some good thing for one reason or another, so apparently nowadays that means that nobody should try.

We really just shouldn't have a death penalty. Boggles my mind that conservatives are so afraid of the federal government having too much power, but okay with it executing citizens.

(Yes, I know it takes a jury decision to authorize the death penalty, but you think evidence couldn't be fabricated? You think juries couldn't be manipulated?)

Even worse. How could a person who's afraid of the government be okay with the government having the right to kill them after a show trial?

I also don't understand how conservatives don't understand that the cops and military they love so much are the enforcers of big government.

Lines were short for you? I had to wait like 4x as long for anything I tried to do because everybody in town was going to the few open businesses, they were running on reduced crews and the socially distanced lines took forever.

I have one and that's how I feel about it. It's also how I feel about my mental health disorders. They are issues I have; I am the thing that exists in spite of them.

Have a body. It's like a thing I own. Yes, its arrangement of neurons and stuff does determine who I am, but aside from that I could make almost innumerable changes to my body and I'd still be the same person.

Oh yeah, I forgot that one but good point

No, you're pretty much spot on.

That's why we have to make sure we vote and put as much pressure as we can on our friends/families to vote in the next few elections.

Will it solve everything? No. But if certain individuals keep winning federal and state elections, they will keep passing laws to make it impossible to make any improvements.

That's why we have to make sure we vote and put as much pressure as we can on our friends/families to vote in the next few elections.

Will it solve everything? No. But if certain individuals keep winning federal and state elections, they will keep passing laws to absolutely strangle workers' rights and education.

I don't know if this is normal, but it happened to me when I used tampons. I assumed it was skin breakdown caused by the moist string in my vaginal opening.

I basically had to switch to cups, because my skin cannot handle anything that traps moisture against it for even a few hours.

Even letting my hair air dry causes my scalp and the skin on my neck to become raw. I have to use a blow drier.

That's why we have to make sure we vote and put as much pressure as we can on our friends/families to vote in the next few elections.

Will it solve everything? No. But if certain individuals keep winning federal and state elections, they will keep passing laws to make it impossible for most individuals to have adequate money and educations.