Reducing Healthcare's Environmental Footprint

The health sector's mandate is to prevent and cure disease. Yet the delivery of health care services - most notably in hospitals - often inadvertently contributes to the problem.

Hospitals generate significant environmental health impacts both upstream and downstream from service delivery, through the natural resources and products they consume, as well as through the waste they generate. 

The healthcare sector is also just beginning to understand the impact that environmental problems such as climate change will have on health care services delivery.

Yet hospitals and health systems everywhere have the potential not only to adapt to the scourges of climate change, but also, in the process, to promote sustainability, greater health equity and environmental health through investing in healthier buildings, purchasing green, and implementing sustainable operations. Hospitals and health systems can leverage their economic positions and moral standing in a community, to help achieve both the Millennium Development Goals related to health and sustainability, while also helping foster a green economy.

Indeed, hospitals and health care workers can be leading promoters of environmental health, by modeling environmentally sustainable, economically sound practices for the broader society and global community.