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How green is your practice? Are you committed to an active role in environmental stewardship? Do your personal beliefs about the environment impact the purchasing and materials-use decisions within your practice?
Environmental sustainability is not a separate committee. It’s not a t-shirt or a marketing tool or something we do for extra credit. Environmental sustainability needs to be saturated into all the aspects of our lives and our organizations. Every decision, every employee and every process needs to be engaged in efforts toward sustainability.
That’s a tall order, especially in a busy medical practice. Fortunately, there’s help on the way. The Green Guide for Health Care (www.gghc.org) is a self-certifying tool that can help steer you through greener design, construction, and operations. A new operations section with particular relevance to office-based practitioners is currently under review and should be available this Spring. The operational strategies outlined in this new Green Guide can really help move your practice further down the path of sustainability.
The Green Guide for Health Care is based on a “credit” system where participants can award themselves points or credits for their efforts to track, frame, and embark on new environmental strategies. This free document, downloadable from the GGHC website, clusters operational topic areas in the following sections:
- Integrated Operation
- Energy Conservation
- Water Conservation
- Chemical Management
- Waste Management
- Environmental Services
- Environmental Purchasing
- Innovation
The information is further broken down within each of these sections into a series of points with the following framework:
- Intent—What are you trying to achieve in earning this credit?
- Health Issues—Why is this activity important for maintaining public health?
- Credit Goals—What concrete activity must be accomplished to say that a particular sustainability issue was addressed?
- Documentation—How will you demonstrate that this objective had been achieved: Through development of stated policy documents? Meeting minutes? Other measures?
- Reference Standard—Is there a regulatory standard relevant to a particular step or strategy you are planning to take?
- Technologies and Strategies—What helpful tools, suggestions or tips could help steer your path to earning a particular credit?
There are credits for implementing greener cleaners, instituting carpool programs for your staff, improving food choices in vending equipment, purchasing EnergyStar-rated equipment, reducing volume of waste through prevention, reuse and recycling, going mercury-free and more.
The Green Guide Operations program will expand over time, to include regional forums, research papers, and educational sessions that continue to support clinics and practices working towards environmental sustainability.
In February, the organizers of the Green Guide for Health Care, The Health Care Clean Energy Exchange, and Hospitals for a Healthy Environment (H2E) came together to form a new not-for-profit group called Practice Green Health. This new organization (www.practicegreenhealth.org) will pull together the three programs to provide a wider breadth of support and engagement on green building strategies, renewable energy systems, sustainable procurement, and conservation in health care. The new organization will continue to provide all the guidance tools that H2E partners have grown accustomed to, while offering a far wider range of materials to a much broader audience.
It’s not so important where on the Green continuum you and your clinic staff start out; the really important thing is that you do start! So whether you begin by looking at energy or water, chemicals or waste, the essential thing is to integrate your personal passion for health into the decision making at your practice, and to start earning those credits towards sustainability.
H2E has a free list serve, where you can swap stories, strategies and questions with other like-minded healthcare professionals. Register online at: http://cms.h2e-online.org/listserv/. Let us know what environmental challenges you’ve tackled in your practice!
Janet Brown is Partner Program Manager for Hospitals for a Healthy Environment, soon to be Practice Green Health. She is on the Steering Committee for the Green Guide for Health Care and co-chairing the review of the Operations Section for Spring 2008 release.
