What is Health Care Without Harm?
As part of this Scaling Snapshot, see also Health Care Without Harm’s Getting Ready for Scale, Scaling Strategies, and Scaling Pearls of Wisdom. You can find the full scaling snapshot PDF here.
Organizational Overview
The Audacious Goal: To align, and thus transform, the health sector to act as an anchor for sustainable, resilient, equitable, and healthy economies and communities, while moving toward a prevention, climate-smart, and community health-focused framework.
The Problem: Fossil fuels, toxic chemicals, and industrial agriculture have been core to the global economy and yet have significant negative impacts on the planet and people’s health. Policies to move away from fossil fuels and toxic chemicals have had limited impact and are often not enduring. The health care sector, whose purpose it is to keep people healthy, has been reliant on many products and practices that have negative effects on environmental and human health.
The Solution: Given the health care sector’s mission to protect and promote health, Health Care Without Harm is building a movement that advocates for extending the sector’s responsibility to include addressing environmental health within its own doors and beyond. With significant purchasing power, moral authority, and political influence, this sector’s adoption of more environmentally sustainable and healthy practices can both reduce its own significant environmental footprint and influence markets (and ultimately, policies and economies) away from fossil fuels, toxic chemicals, and industrial agriculture.
The Impact: HCWH’s programs, projects, and partnerships extend to hospitals and health centers across more than 70 countries. Impacts to date include significant commitments by over 18,000 hospitals globally to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; the shutting down of over 4,500 medical waste incinerators in the U.S.; the purchasing of certified green cleaning chemicals by nearly 80% of facilities in HCWH’s U.S. network; more than 90 manufacturers eliminating toxic chemicals from their hospital furnishings; and the passing of a global treaty phasing out mercury-thermometers and blood pressure devices, stemming from global advocacy and a partnership with the World Health Organization.
The Model-in-Brief: Health Care Without Harm works to create a global movement away from reliance on fossil fuels and toxic chemicals by aggregating the collective power of the health care sector around the following:
- Detoxifying. Working directly with an extensive network of hospitals and health systems across 60 countries, HCWH catalyzes and supports efforts to reduce the sector’s environmental footprint while maintaining quality of care, promoting health equity, and achieving cost savings.
- Purchasing. HCWH organizes the network to aggregate demand for “greener” and more environmentally-friendly products, thereby shifting entire markets and manufacturer practice.
- Advocating. HCWH strengthens the capacity and commitment of health systems and health professionals as trusted messengers to advocate for environmentally sustainable policies and address the climate crisis as a global medical emergency.
The Core Innovation: Acting as a backbone organization and network builder to catalyze widespread change within the healthcare sector, leading to sustainable market and policy changes in favor of planetary, community, and environmental health.
Published September 2020. Find the full Scaling Snapshot PDF at http://bit.ly/ScalingSnapshotHCWH.
Authored by Erin Worsham, Kimberly Langsam, and Ellen Martin.
