Healthcare sustainability challenge

Healthcare structures are supposed to protect and improve Public Health, but in the meanwhile they are highly energy-demanding and socially impactful structures, which cause negative side effects on the people’s health and on the environment. Building hospitals able to cope with the definition of Health as complete well-being and which can fit to the future means therefore constructing sustainable structures. Such complex realities work as a whole, single organism, that can be robust and productive only if every single part is healthy. So when it comes to healthcare facilities, sustainability has to be taken into account as both a main requirement and a quality issue, since they must be capable to deliver high standards also in changing circumstances. Starting from these assumptions the Sustainable High Quality Healthcare project is born with the aim of providing a new original insight into such a complex subject. Its goal is to define, through the construction of an innovative assessment system, solutions and strategies towards the realization of sustainable existing operative or in-design hospitals, where sustainability applies to the main macro-areas. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015.