Sustainability in Healthcare: Combining Organizational and Architectural Levers

by: Marta Pinzone, Emanuele Lettieri and Cristina Masella

Abstract

Healthcare has been progressively required to improve its environmental performance as have other industries in recent years. In this regard, many new healthcare facilities have been built worldwide adopting sustainability‐oriented approaches. However, results have been limited from an ecological and economic perspective, and many projects have rapidly become failures and then been abandoned.

A large part of these failures is grounded in the misalignment between the adoption of eco‐friendly facilities and greening technologies and the persistence of outdated practices, mindsets and behaviours among healthcare professionals.

Keywords: Sustainability, Greening, Healthcare, Hospital, Architecture

Link to material: http://ifors.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/7.pdf