5th WHC Podcast: Taking action on climate change: How we can build sustainable healthcare environments
14 October 2021
For the 5th and final episode of the WHC podcast series, we have invited Walt Vernon, CEO of Mazzetti and Dr. Elizabeth Baca, Specialist Leader at Deloitte, to sit down and discuss how Climate change is at risk of becoming the biggest public health threat of our generation. With his 30 years of experience in designing healthcare facilities, Walt shares examples of common themes across best-in-class thinking towards reducing carbon emission in the healthcare sector and emphasizes the importance of cross-sector collaboration in creating more sustainable and healthier healthcare environments
To learn more about this topic you may join Walt and Dr. Elizabeth in the upcoming 44th World Hospital Congress on 8-11 November in Barcelona. They will be speaking in the session “ Leadership for Sustainability: How healthcare leaders can meet the challenge of climate change”. This session is hosted by the IHF Leadership for Sustainability Special Interest Group. The session will bring together healthcare executives leading this charge from across the world, to share their stories and strategies. Session participants will learn: Practical guidance on developing organizational advocacy for sustainability; Experiences of leaders accelerating the sustainability agenda in their organizations, providing pragmatic advice on making the business case for ‘green leadership’; Innovative examples of leadership programs and projects focused on responding to the sustainability and climate change agenda.
This episode is available on all our platforms: SoundCloud, Anchor, Spotify, Google Podcast, Apple Podcast
About the Speakers:
Walt Vernon
Walt is an IHF Premier Associate Member, who has over 30 years of experience in the research, planning, and design of healthcare facilities. Walt Vernon is CEO of Mazzetti, a global planning, design and engineering firm, and Founder of the non-profit organization, the Sextant Foundation. Alongside these roles, Walt’s industry contributions include serving on the board of both Practice Greenhealth and Health Care Without Harm. He was also was principal author for the World Health Organization’s Health in the Green Economy, as well as AHA’s Sustainability Roadmap for Hospitals – A Guide to Achieving Your Sustainability Goals.
Dr. Elizabeth Baca
Dr. Elizabeth Baca is a clinician-strategist leader at Deloitte providing systems thinking and insights to health care and life science clients to support care delivery innovation to foster total health and well-being recognizing health equity and sustainability are central to this work. She served in both administrations of Governor Brown and Governor Newsom, first as Senior Health Advisor and then Deputy Director. She has worked on a variety of projects to foster health through land use planning, systems change, food systems, precision health, precision medicine and big data. Much of her work is about connecting the dots; she loves working across sectors to foster participant-centered design and collaboration. A significant part of her work is aligning win-wins for projects that offer co-benefits particularly in addressing the social, economic, and environmental factors that impact health. As an example, she has done work to improve health through climate mitigation and adaptation projects.