Health Care Toolkit Calibration: Test-Driving the Green Guide v2.2 Operations Section
Kumkum M. Dilwali, MS, LEED AP®, The Green Guide for Health Care
In the spirit of continuous improvement, how does a healthcare facility calibrate its greening efforts, such as energy efficiency, water use reduction, and waste management? The first toolkit designed specifically for healthcare facility operations to track performance is the Green Guide for Health Care v2.2 Operations Section. This free, voluntary, self-certifying toolkit, available at www.gghc.org was released in 2008, and spans a comprehensive array of credits including energy and water performance, transportation operations, food, environmentally preferable purchasing, facility operations and maintenance, chemical management, environmental services, and waste reduction.
The Green Guide for Health Care recently commissioned a v2.2 Operations Pilot Program, designed to test-drive the credits of the Green Guide Operations Section. This one-year initiative, jointly launched by the Green Guide and Practice Greenhealth, is a groundbreaking effort for the healthcare sector to measure and gauge the implementation of the v2.2 Green Guide Operations Section. About 70 hospital Pilots created a peer-to-peer learning community.
This presentation will include an overview of the toolkit, a short description of the Pilot Program, and highlight facility achievements. We will showcase three Pilot participants as case studies. What constitutes an effective toolkit testing program? How did the Pilots measure their performance? Which Pilots benefited the most? These and other questions will be answered using specific examples experienced during the Pilot program journey.
Biography:
Kumkum M. Dilwali, MS, LEED AP, led the Green Guide Operations Pilot Program as Senior Director of the Green Guide for Health Care. Responsible for all day-to-day activities of the GreenGuide, she also moderated Design & Construction webinar series, coordinated content for Facility Care e-magazine, and redeveloped the Green Guide website. Prior to joining the Green Guide, she was involved in green healthcare design, construction, and operations. She led the green design and construction team on behalf of the Shapiro Center at Brigham and Women's Hospital (Boston, Massachusetts), a Green Guide construction pilot, now the first LEED® Silver facility in the region. As director of safety at Emerson Hospital (Concord, Massachusetts), she launched their first green operations program and maintained Joint Commission compliance. As senior scientist at EH&E (Newton, Massachusetts), she managed complex projects in the building sciences, including technical evaluations of engineered environments. At Harvard University, she coordinated a steering committee for campus-wide sustainability. A chemical engineer (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1981) with environmental management expertise (Harvard School of Public Health, 1995), she is widely published. As an accomplished recording artist, she sang the vocals for "A Healing Garden Grows in Bhopal," a Skoll Foundation video on sustainable healthcare.