CHICAGO — Three personal membership groups of the American Hospital Association (AHA) have teamed to provide their members and others in the healthcare community access to information and tools that can help reduce the environmental footprint of healthcare facilities.
The Association for the Healthcare Environment (AHE, formerly ASHES), the American Society for Healthcare Engineering (ASHE) and the American Society for Healthcare Resource and Materials Management (AHRMM) have collaborated to produce a website, the Sustainability Roadmap for Hospitals.
It provides background material, sample action plans, target-setting and tracking tools, and suggestions for specific steps healthcare organizations can take to improve their sustainability efforts and reduce the environmental impacts of their facilities and operations.
The Roadmap serves as a guide with a range of resources to support hospitals, from Top 10 lists of relatively easy-to-accomplish steps to more in-depth performance improvement measures (such as maximizing water-use efficiency of laundry load cycles).
The new Roadmap website complements the AHA’s Executive Primer on Hospital Environmental Sustainability, which was launched last summer. While the Primer provides healthcare executives with information about sustainability issues relevant to hospitals, the Roadmap is focused toward hospital managers and staff and the designers of healthcare facilities.
“Hospitals have long understood the special role they play as environmental stewards in their community,” says Rich Umbdenstock, AHA president and CEO. “Today’s launch of the Roadmap website will be a useful tool and one more resource available to those striving to reduce their environmental footprint.”
The first phase of development for the Roadmap website is complete, but additional resources are planned for Phase 2. Roadmap users are encouraged to contribute suggestions, sample documents and case studies to supplement the practical information available on the site, the AHA groups say.
Have a question or comment? E-mail our editor Matt Poe at [email protected].