About GHSI

The Global Health and Safety Initiative (GHSI) is a sector-wide collaboration to transform the way that healthcare designs, builds and operates its facilities as well as the products healthcare uses within those facilities. GHSI aims to build a learning community and leverage the expertise of its partners to support evidence-based improvements at the intersection of patient safety, worker safety and environmental sustainability.

While GHSI recognizes that excellent work has been done in the last decade to improve both patient and worker safety, it also recognizes that much work still needs to be done to link these safety issues to sustainability and environmental health. GHSI is working to build a movement in healthcare which marries safety and sustainability and puts healthcare leaders at the center of a global awareness to support healthy people in healthy communities on a healthy planet.

In service of this new integrated approach, GHSI was launched at a meeting in California in October, 2007 with over 125 people in attendance representing various constituencies in the health care sector. Since that time, GHSI, working in collaboration with Health Care Without Harm, Practice Greenhealth, the Center for Health Design, and eighteen founding healthcare systems, has been meeting in five different workgroups on conference calls to craft targeted plans in the following programmatic areas: Purchasing, Built Environment, Operations, Public Policy/Corporate Social Responsibility and Research.

Strengths of GHSI

• GHSI founding members include eighteen of the largest, most influential and prestigious hospital systems in the United States.
• GHSI represents a partnership of leading systems and cutting edge non-profit organizations in the environmental and architectural sectors, including Health Care Without Harm, Center for Health Design and Practice Greenhealth (the successor organization to Hospitals for a Healthy Environment).
• Because of its reach and potential leverage, GHSI has also brought together all the major Group Purchasing Organizations (GPOs) in the country to participate in its Purchasing strategy. It has also brought together important government agencies working on research and different aspects of the built environment, including the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Department of Energy (DOE), Center for Disease Control (CDC) and the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH).