Grow Your Sustainability Competency
Health care facilities must ensure that the work of healing a community does not inadvertently impact that community’s environment — which only offsets health gains achieved inside the building. The sustainability competency calls on health care facilities managers to act as good stewards of resources and actively reduce the field’s impact on the environment through sustainability activities.
This skill is achieved by:
- Identifying and promoting opportunities to utilize green and eco-friendly methods and technologies whenever possible
- Operationalizing a sustainability and energy use program
- Performing extensive initial commissioning and preventing declining efficiency through continuous commissioning
- Creating a long-range plan to recommission or retro-commission departments, floors or buildings
Featured Resources
Electrifying Heat in an Existing Hospital
A groundbreaking case study that establishes the technical and financial feasibility of electrifying an existing hospital building’s thermal load.
How to Prepare for a Decarbonization Study
This monograph provides suggestions to health care executives, facilities managers and sustainability managers on how to start planning, and budgeting, for a transition to clean energy.
Training and Resources
Sustainability Education
Operation Decarbonization
e-learning
Develop a game plan for your health care facility to become more sustainable, reduce consumption and decarbonize using this fun, interactive course.
HealQuest
Live education
This program guides interdepartmental teams through two days of hands-on activities to help make health care facilities more environmentally sustainable and accountable.
Energy Conservation Measures
e-Learning
Review strategies and energy conservation measures (ECMs), or how-to guides, to get started saving energy and money at your health care facility.
Most New Hospitals Guzzle Energy: Keys to Break the Pattern
On-Demand webinar
Learn how to navigate the barriers to adopting energy management best practices and evaluate the root cause of energy intensive health care design.
Building Hospital and Community Resilience in the Face of Climate Change
On-Demand webinar
Panelists share their approaches to managing heat waves, hurricanes and wildfires and highlight best practices for creating climate-ready hospitals as anchors for resilient communities.
The Health Care Leader’s Guide to Sustainability and Decarbonization
Guides/Reports
Get tangible action items for CEOs, COOs, CFOs, boards and sustainability teams to help organization leaders lead the charge in environmental stewardship.
Sustainability Publications and Tools
ASHRAE/ASHE Decarbonizing Hospital Buildings Guidebook
Book
This guide focuses on the design, construction and operation of decarbonized new hospital buildings and major renovations — addressing the field’s unique challenges.
ASHE Sustainability Guide
Monograph
Get step-by-step directions for developing and executing a sustainability program at your health care facility.
ASHE Health Care Decarbonization Code Overlay
Resource
Reduce carbon and emissions from health care operations using this code overlay, which includes recommended changes to several ASHRAE and IECC code versions.
Weathering the Storm: Health care facilities on the front lines of resiliency and recovery
Book
Health care facilities managers share valuable insight on how they faced extreme weather events.
Sustainability Accelerator Tool
Tool
This program allows executives to evaluate and track their organization’s sustainability maturity and performance, and compare it with global health care organizations.
Health Facility Commissioning Guidelines
Book
Offering commissioning information specific to health care facilities, these guidelines assign accountability for actual building performance to the entire project team.