Sustainable Healthcare Facilities: A Scoping Review

Sustainable development has become one of the major objectives in building and operating healthcare facilities, as they exert a major impact on the environment and society. It is also critically important for modern healthcare facilities to adapt to an aging population, rapid technology upgrades, and the increasing demand for quality health care. In this background, sustainable healthcare facilities (SHFs) have attracted growing attention from researchers in the past decade. However, there has not been a clear scope of SHFs, which undermines the theoretical foundation of SHFs evaluation. This study identifies, aggregates, and analyzes the existing body of knowledge to address such issue. We attempted to reveal the dimensions of sustainability in the context of healthcare facilities, the links among the dimensions of sustainability, and the framework of SHFs themes based on a systematic scoping review. A four-dimensional model of sustainability was discussed and a framework of SHFs themes is proposed, consisting of core business, supporting service, and organizational environment layers. We suggest future research to focus more on the core business and organizational environment layers and the links among the different attributes of sustainability in the SHFs field.