Researcher Reflections: Debbie Saber
Healing Healthcare’s Waste Problem
Debbie Saber is an Assistant Professor in the School of Nursing, a Mitchell Center Faculty Fellow, and member of the Mitchell Center Materials Management Research Team.
What problem/s are you working to solve?
My work is three-fold. One aspect is promoting interdisciplinary research and, at the Mitchell Center, it’s interdisciplinary under the scope of sustainability and is about involving undergraduates to work outside of their particular focus of study. As one student explained to us last year, “It’s before the (academic) silos get created.”
Second, with a cohort of undergraduates, we’re working as a group on the problem of food waste. My focus is health care waste, and while some institutions are having a dialog about food waste, many are not.
The third focus is hospital solid waste disposal. Health care is a big contributor of solid waste with a significant amount being generated when trying to combat hospital acquired infections (HAIs). The question we’re asking is, when we produce all this waste, are we doing it for a good reason—do the procedures that we use really do enough to rationalize the cost (monetary and environmental) of all the waste we’re producing?
What progress are you making toward solutions?
The first group of five students working on food waste (we have a follow-up group that has picked up where the previous group left off) all worked extremely well together as a team. They all focused on different aspects of the food waste issue but at the same time collaborated on how these different aspects made up the bigger picture.
Ideally, what will result from this interdisciplinary undergraduate program is learning about food and sustainability, and this could be used as a template for other disciplines as well. One of our students from the first group is now a team leader and is creating a syllabus and assembling reading material for a new course.
How could your findings contribute to a more sustainable future in Maine and beyond?
Because we know if food is just dumped into a landfill, as much of it is, it creates methane, and anything that reduces food waste and makes it more part of a circular economy—a system that works towards environmental sustainability by minimizing food waste through recovery—will therefore help reduce the impact of climate change.
And with respect to hospital solid waste, in my first study I found that 43 percent of the waste from just two contact isolation rooms demonstrates that the procedures used for containing pathogens that can lead to HAIs produce a tremendous amount of waste. There may be other procedures that we can implement and antimicrobial products we can develop that can lead to effective infection control with less waste production.
Why did you decide to join the Mitchell Center?
The advantage of being a Mitchell Center Faculty Fellow is having the ability to make really good connections with colleagues who are studying sustainability issues from all different directions and looking at every level of the sustainability chain.
What’s the best part about collaborating on Mitchell Center research projects?
The best part is working with like-minded, expert, and highly accomplished colleagues towards a goal of sustainably. Being able to write grants and manuscripts, conduct research, and give presentations with the Materials Management team provides a sense of high-level work, support, and personal growth.
What sustains you?
What keeps me going at UMaine and keeps me invigorated is working at the Mitchell Center and working on projects that increase the university and system-wide visibility of health care and nursing, which includes my membership on the steering committee of UMaine Medicine.