The Facility Guidelines Institute invites the public to comment on the second draft of its “Sustainable Design Guidelines for Hospitals and Outpatient Facilities,” a whitepaper prepared as part of the 2014 FGI Guidelines revision process. The paper can be accessed at www.fgiguidelines.org/resources.php.
The sustainable design guidelines in this draft whitepaper, which apply to acute care hospitals and outpatient facilities, are intended to balance the needs of patients, visitors and staff with cost pressures on healthcare facility operations and organizational sustainability goals. FGI involves healthcare administrators, clinicians and design professionals in its standards development process, and a task force developed and reviewed the first round of comments on this whitepaper.
The draft whitepaper is organized under these aspects of sustainable design: building site; energy use; indoor environmental quality; water supply; airborne emissions, effluent and pollutant controls; materials and resources and waste. Baseline requirements are presented for each category and, for most of them, two potential paths for further action—prescriptive or performance. The goal is for a facility to meet the baseline requirements for each section, as well as the requirements for either the performance path or the prescriptive path.
The Facility Guidelines Institute plans to submit the guidelines in this draft whitepaper as a proposal for the 2018 edition of the FGI Guidelines for Design and Construction of Hospitals and Outpatient Facilities, the consensus-based standards for the healthcare built environment. In the meantime, the whitepaper will be posted on the FGI website and referenced in the appendix of the 2014 edition of the Guidelines for Hospitals and Outpatient Facilities.
Comments on the draft whitepaper will be accepted through Jan. 2, 2014; please send them to news@fgiguidelines.org. Comments received will be reviewed by the task force and used to refine the draft. The final whitepaper will be posted in early February 2014.
