Clinical care is a driving factor of health care emissions and pollution. As the largest percentage of a hospital's workforce, it is critical to engage, educate, and empower clinicians to lead change. Health care organizations gain many benefits from positioning a health professional in a leadership role within their sustainability governance structure.

CleanMed will bring us together May 21-23 in Salt Lake City to connect, share, and build upon solutions for a more sustainable health care sector. As the premier health care sustainability conference, CleanMed offers the strategies, tools, and connections you need to make progress toward your goals.

Establishing good governance is critical for advancing sustainability. Good governance promotes clarity, accountability, and transparency, and allows human, natural, economic, and financial resources to be managed efficiently. While governance does not guarantee a strong foundation, its absence severely limits a sustainability program’s success and can, at worst, impede it. Join this session to learn the basics of sustainability governance including core documents, structures, staffing, stakeholders, and resourcing.

Key takeaways:

Food waste solutions are good for people and the planet, yet 38% of all food in the U.S. goes uneaten. During this interactive session, we will get real about challenges leading to wasted food in a hospital setting and identify solutions that are having most impact.

Discussion questions:

• What are your biggest challenges to addressing wasted food?
• What food waste solutions has your organization used, and what were the results?
• What would help you advance your food waste solutions work?

This session will provide Practice Greenhealth partners with a forum to share their experiences developing the elements of effective sustainability governance. Facilitators will guide participants through discussions focused on key processes, such as how to use stakeholder mapping to inform sustainability program structures and strategies to build trust with stakeholders from a system-level perspective.

By collecting and analyzing data on a wide range of factors – including energy and resource use, GHG emissions, waste, supply chain performance, and more – hospitals can generate the deep insights they need to guide their sustainability initiatives and improve their resource efficiency. Measurement is one of the keys to management, and data empowers leaders to make decisions based on facts, trends, and statistics. Join this session to learn about goal setting, data governance, and developing baseline data.

Key takeaways:

This session will provide Practice Greenhealth partners with a forum to share their experiences developing data baselines, creating goals, and establishing successful sustainability strategies. Facilitators will guide participants through a series of interactive exercises on developing cascading goals in alignment with your organization’s mission and establishing data baselines for securing leadership support. Partners will share strategies and tools, resources, and technology they have used to establish performance measures and manage this information.

Sustainability programs that align with organizational priorities will gain senior leadership’s support and lead to long-term success. The vast majority of top-performing health organizations have an executive-level champion at the top of their sustainability reporting structure. This brings credibility and authority to a sustainability program, setting a tone from the top that this work is important, and so is resourcing it. Acquiring leadership support can sometimes be a tall order.

This session will provide Practice Greenhealth partners with a forum to share their experiences obtaining leadership support for sustainability program success. Facilitators will guide participants through an interactive exercise to practice using environmental hooks along with mission alignment and operational benefits channels of appeal. Partners will exchange ideas and their experiences navigating barriers in the process of securing leadership support.

Participants will discuss ways to streamline tracking processes and promote environmentally and socially responsible sourcing within supply chains. Explore innovative, data-driven approaches for monitoring and enhancing sustainable procurement practices.

Discussion questions:

Change happens through people. A successful sustainability program builds a culture that embodies its environmental mission within the assumptions and beliefs of its staff – sustainability then becomes everybody’s job. Further, engaged staff are often willing to play a role in interorganizational collaboration, influencing the supply chain and other key stakeholders. Join this session to learn about stakeholders, communication tools, proven engagement practices, clinical engagement, and how to avoid pitfalls.

Key takeaways:

This session will provide Practice Greenhealth partners with a forum to share their experiences engaging staff to amplify sustainability program success. Facilitators will guide participants through a series of interactive exercises, exploring how to adapt employee engagement strategies that have proven successful in other departments to sustainability issues, what engaged really means, and strategic stakeholder partnering, organizing, and delegating.