AHA Drives Hospital 'Sustainability Roadmap'

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The American Hospital Association has launched a website to help managers and staff at health care organizations implement sustainability improvements at their facilities.

The Sustainability Roadmap includes general information on topics such as building design and construction, commissioning, energy and emissions, water, waste, supply chain and chemicals. The free website also provides a set of tools for strategic planning as well as a step-by-step guide on how to implement performance improvement measures. A search feature allows users to find what they need either by category, department or improvement type.

The website was developed in partnership with three AHA personal membership groups: American Society for Healthcare Engineering, the Association for the Healthcare Environment and the Association for Healthcare Resource & Materials Management.

The AHA says the website is designed to make sustainability easier to achieve by sharing information not only about its successes, but also the pitfalls encountered and mistakes made.

The sustainability website will be improved based on member needs and feedback, the AHA says. A series of case studies on each aspect of sustainability will be added in the future. The case studies will focus on overcoming challenges, sharing tools used in the field and measuring outcomes and results.

Health care organizations have increased efforts to develop sustainable facilities in recent years. For example, the Healthier Hospitals Initiative kept more than 100 million pounds of waste out of landfills in its initial year, according to the program’s first progress report.

The program’s 370 member hospitals recycled more than 50 million pounds of materials and diverted an additional 61.5 million pounds of construction and demolition from landfills through reuse and recycling last year, according to the initiative’s 2012 Milestone Report.

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