Green Guide for Health Care Resources for Healthcare

Green Guide for Health Care™, is the healthcare sector's first quantifiable sustainable design toolkit integrating enhanced environmental and health principles and practices into the planning, design, construction, operations and maintenance of their facilities.
 

This Guide provides the healthcare sector with a voluntary, self-certifying metric toolkit of best practices that designers, owners, and operators can use to guide and evaluate their progress towards high performance healing environments.

Health care facilities present both a challenge and opportunity in the development and implementation of sustainable design, construction and operations practices. Issues such as 24/7 operations, energy and water use intensity, chemical use, infection control requirements and formidable regulatory requirements can pose significant obstacles to the implementation of currently accepted sustainability protocols. Furthermore, it is appropriate that guidelines customized for the health care sector reflect the collective fundamental mission to protect and enhance individual and community health, and that those guidelines acknowledge the intrinsic relationship between the built environment and ecological health.

As health care institutions evolve a design language for high performance healing environments, they have the opportunity to highlight the associated health-based benefits. This in turn can inspire the broader adoption of health-based design principles in other building sectors.

Voluntary Educational Guide for Sustainable Design, Construction and Operations Practices

This online document is neither intended to establish regulatory requirements, nor to be viewed as a minimum standard for design, construction or operations. Rather it is designed to serve as a voluntary educational guide for early adopters of sustainable design, construction, and operations practices, to encourage continuous improvement in the health care sector, and to provide market signals to catalyze a richer palette of strategies for those who follow the early adopters.

As the general level of green building practice rises, it is anticipated that the Green Guide will be updated to encourage continued leadership and higher levels of rigor associated with creating high performance healing environments.

REFERENCE:  Green Guide for Health Care:  www.gghc.org