The COO’s Guide to Environmental Stewardship

Sustainability Roadmap for Health Care
Sustainability for Health Care Facilities Glossary HealQuestTM

Chief operating officers hold a unique opportunity to build and empower teams and accelerate environmental stewardship initiatives. Recognizing that all functional roles can impact sustainability, the COO can support individuals and teams to promote cross-functional teamwork and stimulate innovative sustainability solutions throughout the operations of the organization.

 
Cover image of the AHA's guide: The Health Care Leader's Guide to Sustainability and Environmental Stewardship

The Health Care Leader’s Guide

Sections:

Sustainability Team | CEO | COO | CFO | Board | Business Case

As the leader responsible for health care operations, the chief operating officer’s actions can effectively accelerate environmental stewardship initiatives. Conversely, without COO support, meaningful improvements in environmental stewardship are unlikely. The COO need not be an expert in sustainability but must actively strive to integrate sustainability into business processes.

The Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) uses the triple aim as a framework to optimize health system performance, which can also be applied to environmental stewardship. The triple aim seeks improvements in health care by optimizing practices that:

  • Improve the patient experience.
  • Improve population health.
  • Reduce per capita costs of care.

The IHI says it recognizes that improvements happen when teams have the will, which unlocks ideas that are supported for implementation.

Tapping into this familiar thought process, organizations can seek out improvements for environmental stewardship. The COO can recognize that all functional roles impact sustainability in health care and empower individuals to participate in problem-solving to help with employee recruitment and retention. Framing sustainability as a growth mindset helps to identify areas for improvement, promote cross-functional teamwork and stimulate solutions — many likely to come from the supply chain.

Any strategic initiative must have leadership. While sustainability teams can be a great way to start, too often they are composed of only volunteers. Environmental stewardship could be included in job descriptions for supervisors to support the initiative. When individuals have clear support for these efforts, they give it the time it needs.

Sections

 

Leading Toward Sustainability

 

Improving sustainability within health care organizations requires all departments (and truly, all employees and contractors) to:

  1. Understand the importance of improving sustainability (connect to mission).
  2. Commit to seeking out opportunities to change current practice in a way that improves key performance indicators.
  3. Collaborate with other stakeholders to review and assess ongoing performance.

The complexity of health care facility operations and sourcing requires sustainability and decarbonization to be a strategic priority to achieve meaningful change in KPIs like carbon emissions.

 

Recommendations for the Health Care COO

 
  1. Build a cross-functional team of leaders to drive strategy.
    • Allocate time and incorporate sustainability in job descriptions.
    • Instruct the team of leaders to work with all departments to implement initiatives.
    • Ask team to provide regular updates, such as monthly operations meetings.
  2. Establish a management system for environmental stewardship.
    • Track KPIs that will measure real progress alongside patient outcomes.
    • Incorporate sustainability KPIs into department-level goals.
    • Realign internal processes to support sustainability.
  3. Encourage a growth mindset by supporting education for sustainability.
    • Host learning sessions with local experts.
    • Sponsor focused training for employees to become experts.
    • Share your own successes with other organizations.