Global Health and Safety Initiative (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 used within those facilities. GHSI was launched in October 2007 in Oakland, CA. Leading healthcare sytsems and nonprofits joined together to create this groundbreaking program to green the healthcare industry and improve patient and worker health and safety.

GHSI aims to build a learning community and to leverage the expertise of its partners to support evidence-based improvements that advance patient and worker safety and environmental sustainability. While GHSI recognizes that excellent work has been done in the last decade to improve patient and worker safety, it also recognizes that much work still needs to be done to link these safety issues to environmental health and sustainability.

Founding nonprofits:

Healthcare Without Harm

The Center for Health Design

Practice Greenhealth

Founding health systems:

Allina Hospitals & Clinics
Ascension Health
Bon Secours Health System
Catholic Healthcare West
Cleveland Clinic Foundation
Geisinger Health System
Health Alliance Gr. Cincinnati
Henry Ford Health Systems
Hospital Sisters Health System
Kaiser Permanente
MedStar Health
Presbyterian Health Services
Providence Health
St. Joseph of Orange
U. C. San Francisco Medical Ctr
U. Chicago Medical Center
U. Michigan Medical Center
U. Pittsburgh Medical Center

Workgroups
All of the work completed for the GHSI takes place in five workgroups. These include: Built Environment, Corporate Social Responsibility, Healthy Purchasing, Research and Education, and Sustainable Operations.

The Center for Health Design co-facilitates the Built Environment Workgroup. Working in partnership with the other workgroups, the Built Environment Work Plan is designed to organize and develop information, resources and tools to address high priority areas of concern with a focus on integrative health-based design and evidence based design practices. Participating healthcare systems in GHSI will have access to an array of tools and "best practices" to implement strategies that will augment patient safety, workplace safety, and maximize the sector's environmental performance, while reducing healthcare's eco-footprint.

The Ripple Database (BETA)

The Center for Health Design is constructing a "best practices" database for sustainable and evidence-based design in healthcare design and construction. The open source, searchable database will include 170 design practices that Kaiser Permanente has adopted, along with best practice examples and relevant information from CHD's Pebble Research Projects and Practice Greenhealth's Green Guide for Healthcare (GGHC) registered projects that have developed over the last several years. The case studies will capture positive outcomes that cut across patient safety, workers safety and environmental sustainability. Participants will be able to easily access these "best practices" with accompanying research, business case, "how to" guidance, and contact information. The database will also have a wiki capacity so that organizations will be able to share their own best practice information and build a learning network.

In phase two of the project , users will be able to compare actual design decisions made by mulitple health systems and see the results of those decisions and interact with colleagues to discuss how to use this information and leverage current and anticipated exemplary practices to design hospitals of the future.

We are interested in hearing your feedback about this project. To view the BETA version of the Ripple Database, click here.

Interested in being a database tester? Contact Carolyn Quist at 925.521.9404 x113.

For questions or comments about the database, please contact Donna Deckard at 925.521.9404..