A Multidisciplinary Sustainability Evaluation System for Operative and In-Design Hospitals

The Sustainable Healthcare project developed an original multidisciplinary evaluation tool, specifically designed to assess and improve a hospital’s global sustainability by considering together the environmental, social and economic issues, so to give a comprehensive evaluation of the hospital, according to an appropriate concept of sustainability. The system, which aimed to be simple, light and easy-touse, includes the main weighting to enhance sustainability, organized in a hierarchical way: specific indicators are contained in a series of criteria, which represent the most critical factors and the most effective starting points for hospital’s sustainability improvement. They are finally divided into the three macro-areas of sustainability: social, economic and environmental sustainability. In order to takeinto account the different interrelationships among the various components of the system, a weighting process was carried out according to the Analytic Network Process method by Saaty in 2005. This allowed to take into consideration different users’ points of view and, most importantly, the human factor, thanks to the development of a weighting system based on the opinions of specific focus groups, which included experts and professionals from different healthcare sectors. The evaluation system’s application to a hospital allows the structure’s global sustainability to be assessed.