Sustainable Hospitals: A Socio-Ecological Approach

Although sustainable development is closely interrelated with health and health promotion, in health care systems these themes are hardly ever discussed and even more rarely implemented in combination. We see opportunities for sustainable development and health promotion, particularly in hospitals, since they play a central role in health care systems. Furthermore, hospitals have significant and growing economic, social, and environmental impacts, which in turn cause adverse effects upon health. In a transdisciplinary project involving scientists and health care practitioners we examined how sustainability can be conceptualized for hospitals in line with both a socio-ecological understanding of sustainable development and with "hospitals' reality". Our approach aims at avoiding unintended long-term and side effects of health care – hospitals' core business – by expanding quality criteria for decision making to include sustainability and health gain improvement. An example demonstrates that a hospital can thereby improve its future viability and contribute to global sustainability.