The story below is from our January/February 2022 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
She came up with a way to affect Carilion Clinic’s environmental impact and those programs are growing.
When Carilion Clinic CEO and president Nancy Agee was asked to give an evaluation of Sara Wohlford, the organization’s Efficiency and Sustainability Manager, she brightened up and let it flow:
“Sara Wohlford has to be one of the dearest, kindest, most curious and smartest people I know. She’s simply extraordinary. Her enthusiasm, coupled with genuine curiosity, has charmed us.
“Our clinical teams are eager to find ways to recycle and be ‘green.’ She carefully and thoughtfully considers opportunities and offers suggestions for improvement. Her understanding of changes to safeguard the environment, devices or ecosystem so we can be more efficient as well as environmentally conscious and effective is enormously helpful. Importantly, she is helping us provide the best care possible, avoid medical errors and create a positive work and safeguard our environment for the long haul.
“At the height of COVID, I would find her on one of our COVID units, in full PPE, observing how staff was performing in that new and difficult environment and making suggestions to help them work with patients. It would have been so easy for her to work from home or a desk somewhere, but she and her team were right there, helping even when it was a frightening experience for everyone.”
That “frightening experience for everyone” resulted in a turn with the dread virus for Wohlford, one she said resembled “a bad case of the flu.” But she never complained. She doesn’t do that. She simply goes to what’s next and looks for positive results.
Those results have helped clutter Wohlford’s desk with awards: Practice Greenhealth Environmental Excellence Award (2017-2021); Governor’s Environmental Excellence Award – Gold (2019); Virginia Nurses Foundation, 40 Under 40 (2015).
Wohlford, 45, earned a degree in broadcast journalism with a focus on PR, then pivoted to health care at Jefferson College of Health Sciences nursing school, and finally, earned a master’s in public health from Virginia Tech. She and her building contractor husband Arthur had two babies in the middle of that.
She was working at Carilion when the Big Idea came to her: Make Carilion an environmental role model. She studied the possibilities beginning in 2004. “I talked to Nancy about it, spent quite a bit of time – several years – revising the plan. When I felt like I was in position with a sound request, I took it to Nancy. She was so welcoming and gave really good feedback on how to strengthen the case.”
Her plan is making its way through the entire Carilion system of hospitals, emphasizing environmental impact, helping to cut costs and waste and stressing recycling and reuse (including eliminating as many single-use plastic products as possible).
“What’s exciting for me is to know that in Carilion’s 2025 strategic plan, environmental sustainability is directly addressed for the first time. That made me incredibly excited. For health care, sustainability, environmental health and community health are vital. This is a positive direction and there are some health systems that have been doing it for 10-20 years, so not flying blind.”
She has helped organize the Carilion system with Sustainability Strategic Deployment, pulling 19 senior people to discuss, plan and implement it. Her department is small with just her and one sustainability coordinator—Marina Sopello—“who helps manage all the programs, especially when they are up and running. There are lots of nuts and bolts to keep in place. She is my right hand.”
Wohlford asks, “What do we want our focus to be on? There are several goals: 1. communication; 2. less waste; 3. greening the OR; 4. leaner energy.
“Across all hospitals we want a 20% recycling rate compared to total waste. We want to evaluate composting. We want to achieve a 50-80% construction and demolition recycling rate on new projects. [Carilion is involved in a major construction project.] For the OR, we want to reduce the volume of blue wrap to landfills by 50% and reduce greenhouse gas emissions from anesthetic waste gases; reduce average energy use across all hospitals by three percent by 2025.”
Ambitious? “We can accomplish this. I believe in it.”
As she helps remake the work environment at Carilion, she is also emphasizing environmentalism to her daughters, who are 12 and 14. “It’s been neat with our children,” she says. “We have raised them doing the physical stuff: recycling, singing songs while picking up trash on walks. We’ve made it easy for them and engrained environmentalism into who they are. They have become young ladies who like to go out and help in the community. I wanted them to enjoy it with me because it is so important to me and wouldn’t it be great if kids wanted to do good things? We want to teach them to be mindful citizens.”
Ultimately, Wohlford says, “I am really so proud of the program, the steps we’ve taken, the progress we’ve made.”
Nancy Agee agrees.
The story above is from our January/February 2022. For more stories, subscribe today or view our FREE digital edition. Thank you for supporting local journalism!
