Greening the healthcare sector

Greening the healthcare sector

He quickly revolted against his family and neighbors after he returned from England, where he studied ophthalmology, even though he grew up in the company of Mrs. Zeinab – may God be pleased with her – and absorbed the customs and traditions of the Egyptian neighborhood, most importantly the lofty status of the Ahl al-Bayt; He revolted against those who lived to seek blessings from the Mother of the Infirm, to whom they turned when the paths of this world were narrow for them. They cast at the doorsteps of her shrine the mountains of their worries mixed with the rivers of their tears, and if anyone’s eyes became irritated, he rushed to touch them with the oil of one of the mosque’s lanterns. There, Ismail rejected everything around him, and destroyed the lamp. He saw him as a symbol of ignorance and backwardness, and on the other hand, his family and neighbors boycotted him after they saw his action as a waste of the symbolic value of the Household.

Ismail failed – by using science only – to sweep away the spaces of darkness and ignorance, and his clinic remained vacant and no one approached it, and he did not succeed until he put science in one hand and religion in the other; He was guided by putting some jellyfish oil in the clinic, deceiving patients that he was using it for treatment, so that Yahya Haqqi emphasized in his novel the duality of science and faith.

Following in the footsteps of Professor Tawfiq al-Hakim in his novel “Diary of a Deputy in the Rural Areas,” Dr. Muhammad al-Mansi Qandil wrote the novel “A Rural Doctor” in 2020. It tells the story of a doctor who was assigned to work in one of the remote areas. He goes forced and bored, and there he discovers the absence of knowledge and the acquisition of primitive laws absolute authority in the life of a society far from urbanization and the causes of civilization. Which had a negative impact on the health of the population.

Eighty years separated two novels that took medicine as the main focus for measuring society’s progress, and the result is the same: eight decades and the old ideas remain intact. In other words, “our perforated words are like old shoes,” as Nizar Qabbani said in his poem “Footnotes on the Notebook of Setback.” As it is, times change but ideas do not change.

Eight decades in which science developed at an exponential speedExponential, in which inventions emerged that changed the face of the world, and the Internet upended the service sector; Here is the largest fleet of cars managed by a company that does not own a single car, and the largest number of hotel rooms managed by electronic platforms, whose owners do not have room keys in a three-star hotel, and hospitals and clinics are also managed through electronic platforms without the need for their operators to buy an examination bed in a hospital. It is no longer important to be the owner, the most important thing is to know how to manage.

The number of Internet users has doubled compared to 2010, the Internet has expanded about 20 times, and cloud services have grown, as well asData CentersData Centers, and their energy needs have grown.

Last January, the International Energy Agency (IEA) issued a report on data centers’ electrical energy consumption, which amounted to 460 terawatt-hours, equivalent to 2.0% of the total global electricity consumption, and is likely to rise to double this value in just two years. By 2026.

Accordingly, the report emphasizes the importance of technological development on the one hand, and working to improve the efficiency of use on the other hand. It also confirms that the drivers of electricity demand in the next few years will be concentrated in the electric car sector and data centers, as well as artificial intelligence processors, and mining cryptocurrencies, with which advanced economies are expected to be responsible for raising the demand rate by about 85%, specifically in countries such as China, India, and Southeast Asian countries, as well as Data centers are expected to account for 20% of electricity demand in Denmark and Ireland by 2026.

A study published in February 2023 under the title “Healthcare Facilities: The Road Towards Energy Efficiency & Conservation” showed that the global health sector’s consumption of electrical energy ranged between 5-8%, and in Europe alone it rises to 20%, while the sector’s contributions to Greenhouse Gases (GHGs) (Greenhouse Gases (GHGs), GHGs) reach 10%, about 12% from acid rain, and about 10% from air pollution. This comes at a time when the World Health Organization (WHO) published on its website an article in which it explained (that approximately one billion people in low-income countries, and those located at the bottom of the middle-income bracket, benefit from health care facilities that do not have good electricity sources.

This is while 12% and 15% of citizens of low- and middle-income countries in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa – respectively – do not have access to electricity. In sub-Saharan Africa, only half of hospitals have reliable access to electricity. What about developing the health services sector and establishing data centers that serve the citizens of those countries?! Bringing up something like this in such countries seems like a bloody joke!! Even though they are the most basic rights of citizenship.

It is worth noting that a third of the global data centers are located in America, where it alone consumes 6% of its total electrical energy, while 17% of it is located in Ireland, and it is expected that this will rise to 32% by the year 2026. The interest in establishing data centers has led to research into mechanisms for greening them; That is, relying on renewable energy sources to supply electricity, and the size of the green data center market is expected to grow by $146.95 billion, at a compound annual growth rate of 24.63% between 2022 and 2027.

Hence, it is expected that renewable energy sources, whether those concerned with producing electricity such as solar cells, wind energy, etc., or those used in producing thermal energy for heating and cooling purposes, in addition to technologies for improving the efficiency of energy use, will play pivotal roles in the coming years, as they will reduce the demand for fossil fuels. Thus, greening the health care sector and improving its carbon footprint, especially since these efforts keep pace with their counterparts made in factories that produce energy storage technologies.

These are paths planned by many countries, and walking on them is no longer a luxury or a prestige, but has become an inevitable necessity. Otherwise, decades after decades will pass, and the events of the novel “A Rural Doctor” will be repeated in every country lagging behind on the path of knowledge and faith, with a new pen and repeated events.