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Water Benchmark Fact Sheet

The document provides water use benchmarks for Irish hospitals to assess their water usage and identify potential issues like leaks. It explains that the HSE spends over €8 million annually on water and benchmarks involve comparing a hospital's annual water use in liters to the number of patient bed days. Graphs show water usage benchmarks for acute and community health hospitals, identifying good, normal, and poor practice water usage ranges. Benchmarking is important to determine if a hospital is using more water than it should be and identify any issues like undetected leaks that could be addressed.

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Mehrdad Noei Aghaei
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56 views2 pages

Water Benchmark Fact Sheet

The document provides water use benchmarks for Irish hospitals to assess their water usage and identify potential issues like leaks. It explains that the HSE spends over €8 million annually on water and benchmarks involve comparing a hospital's annual water use in liters to the number of patient bed days. Graphs show water usage benchmarks for acute and community health hospitals, identifying good, normal, and poor practice water usage ranges. Benchmarking is important to determine if a hospital is using more water than it should be and identify any issues like undetected leaks that could be addressed.

Uploaded by

Mehrdad Noei Aghaei
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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FACT SHEET Water Use Benchmarks for Irish Hospitals

Introduction
The HSE is one of the largest users of water in Ireland, spending over €8 million annually at its
2,500 locations nationally. Water costs vary considerably across the country from a high of €3.04
per m3 to a low of €1.49 per m3 (non-domestic water charges 2016). However, regardless of
how much water is costing in your area, a key goal for all HSE locations is to ensure that they are
getting the most of the water that they pay for. In order to assist Irish hospitals address this, the
GreenHealthcare programme has developed water use benchmarks for both Acute and PCCC
hospitals.

Benchmarking involves gathering the annual water use for a hospital and comparing it to the
number of patient bed days provided by the hospital (a standard benchmarking figure for the
healthcare sector). Through doing this you normalise the water use data and can then compare
different hospitals on a common basis (i.e. the water used for each patient bed day).

To calculate the water use benchmark for your hospital input the following
information for the most recent 12-month period:

Volume of water used (m3) *1000


_______________________________________________ = benchmark (litres)
No. of Patient bed days (or number of beds * 365)

While every hospital is different in terms of size, services and on site activity, benchmarking
provides a useful initial indicator of how a hospital is performing relative to others.

Why Benchmarking is important

IT’S EASY TO THINK THAT ALL IS WELL


IN TERMS OF WATER SUPPLY IN YOUR
HOSPITAL BUT UNTIL YOU BENCH
COMPARE TO OTHER HOSPITALS OF
THE SAME YOU WON’T KNOW FOR SURE.

One of the main issues that Irish hospitals encounter regarding their water use is leaks. Leaks are
a waste of water resources and expenditure but can also cause further problems including:

1. Contamination of water supply - this is of particular importance in hospitals where bacterial


growth in water pipes can lead to legionella and/or pseudomonas issues
2. Reduced water pressure at points of use
3. Reduced hours of storage capacity

Benchmarking water use is an important first step in assessing if your hospital is using more water
than it should be.

By comparing the water use benchmark of your hospital to other similar hospitals (i.e. Acute or
Community Health Hospitals) you can determine how your hospital is performing. If your hospital
is performing poorly in comparison, then it may be down to a number of issues, one of which is
undetected leaks.

Various leak detection and control techniques can then be used to reduce leakage, or prioritise
pipe repair/ replacement on a value for money basis.
Acute Hospital Benchmarks
The following profile shows the water use per patient bed day for over 50% of the Acute hospitals
in Ireland. Based on these data good practice indicators have been statistically calculated.

Water Usage (litres) per Patient Bed Day in 2015

1500
1400
1300
Above 900 litres 1200
Poor Practice 1100
Water use (litres)

1000
900
600-900 litres 800
Normal Practice 700
600
500
400
Below 600 litres
300
Good Practice 200
100
0

Community Health Hospital Benchmarks


The following profile shows a similar profile for water use per patient bed day benchmarks for Irish
Community Health Hospitals. To date (2017) data has been gathered for 25% of the Community Health
Hospitals nationally and, based on these, good practice indicators have been statistically calculated.

Water Usage (litres) per Patient Bed Day in 2015

1400
1300
1200
1100
1000
Above 400 litres
Water use (litres)

Poor Practice 900


800
700
600
500
400
250-500 litres
Normal Practice 300
200
Below 200 litres 100
Good Practice 0

For more information contact Green Healthcare (www.greenhealthcare.ie)


or the National Health Sustainability Office (www.hse.ie/sustainability)

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