How petroleum plays a critical role in our healthcare

From power and transportation to PPE and supplies, oil-based plastics are crucial to our hospitals and our health
By Brittany Elves
Medical professionals operating on patient in ICU. Doctors and nurses wearing protective coveralls. They are at hospital during pandemic.

Most Cana­di­ans typ­i­cal­ly only think about Canada’s oil and gas when fill­ing up their gas tank or light­ing their bar­beque. What they don’t real­ize is that petro­le­um and petro­le­um chem­i­cals are extreme­ly ver­sa­tile and can be found in many prod­ucts we use every day includ­ing plas­tics, tex­tiles, pack­ag­ing, deter­gents, fertilizers.

Our health­care sys­tem also relies on petro­le­um not only to pow­er hos­pi­tals and trans­port patients, but to man­u­fac­ture equip­ment and pharmaceuticals.

How are petro­le­um-based prod­ucts being used in health­care? Here is a breakdown:

Pow­er

Ener­gy con­sump­tion in hos­pi­tals is large­ly used for space heat­ing and cool­ing, steam gen­er­a­tion, ven­ti­la­tion, high pow­ered light­ing, equip­ment usage, hot water, and cook­ing. Nat­ur­al gas pro­vides approx­i­mate­ly two-thirds of the typ­i­cal Cana­di­an hospital’s ener­gy requirements.

The remain­der is pro­vid­ed by elec­tric­i­ty, which can be gen­er­at­ed from nat­ur­al gas, coal, hydro, wind, solar, bio­mass or nuclear sources.

Trans­porta­tion

Ambu­lances run on gaso­line and diesel while air ambu­lances and heli­copters run on avi­a­tion fuel. Ontario’s Ornge air ambu­lance ser­vice sent heli­copters and fixed wing air­craft on more than 8,000 mis­sions last year, trav­el­ling over 17 mil­lion kilo­me­tres to ensure life-sav­ing care for crit­i­cal patients. STARS air ambu­lance, which serves Alber­ta, Saskatchewan and Man­i­to­ba, had 2,994 mis­sions last year, and respond­ed to more than 32,000 emer­gency requests.

Per­son­al Pro­tec­tion Equip­ment (PPE) 

PPE is a main­stay in health­care cen­tres. Gloves, res­pi­ra­tors, gog­gles, gowns and face shields are all pro­duced using petrochemicals.

Most of the main com­po­nents of an N‑95 mask are made from petro­le­um prod­ucts such as poly­eth­yl­ene and polypropy­lene, which are poly­mers derived from nat­ur­al gas and pro­duced dur­ing the petro­le­um refin­ing process.

Med­ical Equipment 

Plas­tic is a very com­mon ele­ment con­tained in med­ical equip­ment and devices required for med­ical pro­ce­dures and patient care:

  • X‑rays and MRIs
  • Mon­i­tors
  • IVs
  • Tubes
  • Trays
  • Scopes
  • Wheel­chairs
  • Valves
  • Syringes
  • Stetho­scopes
  • Arti­fi­cial limbs
  • Fiber­glass casts

Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals

Petro­le­um and petro­chem­i­cals are used to pro­vide poly­mers for pill cap­sules and coat­ings; and pack­ag­ing for phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals is often pro­duced from plas­tic to keep prod­ucts ster­ile, child proof and safe from breakage.

Recy­cling plas­tics to reduce waste

The Chem­istry Indus­try Asso­ci­a­tion of Cana­da esti­mates 70,000 prod­ucts used by Cana­di­ans every day are made from plastics.

Canada’s plas­tics indus­try is com­mit­ted to solv­ing the plas­tic waste prob­lem and has set a goal to make 100 per cent of plas­tic pack­ag­ing recy­clable or recov­er­able by 2030.

The pro­duc­tion of high­ly recy­clable plas­tics such as poly­eth­yl­ene is imper­a­tive to meet­ing this goal.

Through inno­va­tion and tech­nol­o­gy, the petro­chem­i­cal indus­try is tran­si­tion­ing towards a cir­cu­lar econ­o­my where mate­ri­als are reused and recy­cled in a closed and sus­tain­able loop.