The Green Guide for Health Care (GGHC) was 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 facilities. GGHC is a voluntary, self-certifying metric toolkit of best practices that designers, owners, and operators use to guide and evaluate their progress toward high performance healing environments. Since its inception in 2002, GGHC has attracted 160 registered projects, representing close to 40 million square feet of green healthcare facilities in the United States and abroad.
With the introduction of LEED for Healthcare, the GGHC has significantly revised its operations section to emphasize continuous improvement and frame best practices in operations and maintenance protocols, keeping abreast of the momentum in policy and practice toward green building and operations methods and materials.
Revision highlights include the following:
• Updated regulatory standards, best practices, and resources reflecting the most current available information.
• An expanded scope that addresses merging priorities in healthcare operations and maintenance, including emissions reporting, low-impact grounds maintenance, sustainable food service, and multi-attribute environmentally preferable purchasing policies.
• An emphasis on continuous improvement and integrated operations and education.
The Green Guide for Health Care is available as a free download from the GGHC Web site: www.gghc.org.
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