A Proposal: Nurse-Sensitive Environmental Indicators

Healthcare contributes significant pollution to the natural environment. Nurses are obligated by professional commitment, to avoid causing harm in their care processes and decisions, including environmental harm. Nurse awareness of healthcare-generated pollution is growing but nurses may lack an understanding of how nursing contributes specifically to this pollution and what nurses can do within their scope and span to address it. This chapter introduces the concept “Nurse-Sensitive Environmental Indicators” as a proposal to identify, measure, and reduce the unintended harm of nursing practice that contributes to healthcare-generated pollution. It discusses the environmental problem, environmental health, and healthcare. The chapter explains what environmental stewardship has to do with nursing and describes nurse sensitive indicators. As has been the case with other quality outcomes measures, identifying agreed-upon environmental outcomes measures may give the nursing profession tools to measure and then address environmental impacts arising from nursing practice.