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About Health Care Without Harm
Health Care Without Harm is an international organization dedicated to providing resources, knowledge, and inspiration for the health care sector to help reduce its environmental impact. We have been advocating for the environment and our health since 1996.
Our vision
Health care mobilizes its ethical, economic, and political influence to create an ecologically sustainable, equitable, and healthy world.
Our mission
Health Care Without Harm seeks to transform health care worldwide so that it reduces its environmental impact, becomes a community anchor for sustainability, and a leader in the global movement for environmental health and justice.
Our approach
Our powerful network will transform the health sector — ensuring it can balance the immediate needs for mitigation, resilience, and equity, while serving as a leader in the broader shift to a just, low-carbon economy.
We believe health systems must be reimagined as decarbonized anchors of healthier, resilient, more equitable communities that can survive and thrive in the face of a changing climate.
Our subject matter expertise
- Climate and health: Mitigation, resilience and leadership for health care organizations and their communities
- Sustainable procurement: Making it easier for health care to purchase safer toxic-free alternatives while harnessing health care’s purchasing power to move the market.
- Safer chemicals: Choosing safer products, reducing hazardous chemical use, and adopting safer health care practices.
- Healthy food: Food service strategies, programs, and policies for health care that reduce climate impact and food waste and grow resilient food systems.
- Waste management: Paving the way towards the reduction of plastics and waste in health care and protecting the environment through sustainable health care waste management.
- Place-based partnerships: Facilitating deep, trusting partnerships with community-based organizations to build replicable models for collaborative action.
Our network and reach
Over three decades, Health Care Without Harm has built the most extensive global network at the intersection of human and planetary health. This network offers our best chance for scaling and sustaining proven climate and health solutions.
Our affiliated network Practice Greenhealth is the innovation hub scaling the work of Health Care Without Harm. It is the leading sustainable health care organization, delivering environmental solutions to more than 1,700 hospitals and health systems in the United States and Canada, including the Veterans Administration health system and the Army’s MedCom facilities. Partnership opportunities include NGOs, nonprofits, government, academic institutions, and the health care value chain.
1 in 4 health facilities in the United States including 1,700+ members with all 50 states and every type of hospital represented.
Beyond the U.S. and Canada, our global hospital network, Global Green and Healthy Hospitals, represents over 70,000 hospitals and health centers, treating hundreds and millions of patients in 86 countries.
Health Care Without Harm has regional teams in the United States, Europe, Southeast Asia, and Latin America where staff work on community-based projects as well as national and global initiatives. We also have strategic partnerships with organizations in Australia, Brazil, China, India, Nepal, and South Africa as well as joint projects with the United Nations Development Programme and World Bank.