This commentary by Roger Allbee, CEO of Grace Cottage Family Health and Hospital in Townshend. He is a former secretary of the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets.
[A]s a major health care provider in Windham County, we’d like to share a recent success story that demonstrates how investing in energy efficiency has helped us provide better care to our community by reducing our operating costs while providing better comfort to our patients and staff.
At Grace Cottage Family Health & Hospital, our vision is to provide excellent patient-centered care and to preserve and prolong the well-being of the whole community. In order to do this, we need to keep our patients and staff warm.
Thanks to donations from a very generous community, and to technical guidance and financial help from Efficiency Vermont, we’ve recently completed a major upgrade to our heating, cooling, and ventilation system at Grace Cottage Family Health, our rural health clinic. This effort and an earlier one to upgrade lighting throughout the facility have reinforced how important it is to focus on the efficiency of the facilities where we provide care. Operating the hospital, clinic, rehabilitation department, pharmacy and other supporting services requires a lot of energy, and thus costs a lot of money. Our partnership with Efficiency Vermont has helped us to make great strides to improve efficiency and reduce costs.
Efficiency Vermont provided technical guidance and financial help, beginning with an engineering audit of our clinic building, which led to a blueprint for comprehensive, state-of-the art efficiency upgrades. These upgrades included: insulation and air sealing to reduce heat loss, replacing our old oil-fired boiler and window air conditioning units with a high efficiency heat pump system, providing fresh air through an energy recovery ventilation system, and upgrading our lighting to modern LED technology.
Together, these upgrades will provide a more comfortable indoor environment year-round, while providing highly efficient methods of lighting, heating, cooling, and ventilating, and also saving money.
Our decision to invest in our facilities, with the help of our generous and supportive community, has resulted in an improved work environment for our staff, a better patient experience, and a more cost-effective operation. We are able to achieve these upgrades with little disruption to patient services. Our work with Efficiency Vermont, as well as what we have done internally, will earn us nearly $35,000 in savings per year, which we can now reinvest in improvements in patient care.
We’re committed to continuously improving our operations and the service we provide our community as we aim for excellence. This is just one example of how we’re going beyond patient care.
