By Sarah Paset, Lily Wherry, Eddie Galvin, Gabriel Hernandez, Keerthana Muthukrishnan, and Ben Tran. Edited by Melissa Ikeda.
The 2018 Sustainability Action Research Hospital Team is striving to help the UCLA Ronald Regan Medical Center save not only lives, but also the environment! See what they’ve been up to as they tackle the complex issue of hospital sustainability.
Week 2: Getting Started
The Hospital Sustainability Team has had a great week full of our first few SAR meetings, leadership development activities, and team bonding opportunities! We’re excited to work with one another and are ready to start delving into our project.
Week 3: Stakeholder Meetings
This week team met with our stakeholder, Sara, who’s the manager of the sustainability department for UCLA Health. We were surprised to find out she works in a one person department, and is solely in charge of sustainability in UCLA hospitals! Here we are pictured at Jimmys coffee house, editing our literature review on sustainability in hospitals.
Week 4: Reaching New Heights
On route to our weekly team meeting, Mr. Eddie Galvin finally overcomes his fear of trees as the Hospital Team helps each other reach new heights.
Week 5: Team Work
The Hospital Team led an in-class activity this week for all SAR teams. The challenge was to work as a team to raise a marshmallow the highest using just spaghetti and tape!
Tackling the big questions and strategizing techniques to connect sustainability with patient-care in between classes!
Week 6: Press Release
The Hospital team hard at work on their Press Release.
The Hospital Team bonding with each other and Mother Earth.
Week 7: Sweet Meetings
Team Hospital before the sugar hit
Team Hospital after the sugar hit
Week 8: Learning about UC sustainable procurement
Eddie representing our team while pitching an idea to make LA 2028 Olympics more sustainable.
Hospital Team staying cozy after a successful week learning about UC sustainable procurement from Associate Director of Sustainability Hilary Bekmann, researching health care best practices, and making a plan of action for the upcoming weeks.
Week 9: Future Plans and Problem Solving
We started off our week with some great team bonding time at Native Foods! Over this lunch, we not only got to know each other even better, we also had a chance to discuss future plans and practice problem solving strategies. Then during our all SAR meeting, the team put our creativity to a test by creating a work of art from “trash” – culminating in an abstract display to celebrate International Women’s Day.
Week 10: Midterm presentations!
Read more about the Hospital Team’s mission on their Project Page. To check out other current and past SAR teams, visit the “Our Work” page, and don’t forget to give our Facebook page a “like” to keep up to date with what we’re up to!