LTC Scorecard Project

Through collaboration with long-term care (LTC) and retirement home (RH) partners and with funding support from Ontario’s Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO), the Canadian Coalition of Green Health Care has developed a new comprehensive made-in-Canada environmental benchmarking tool designed specifically for the LTC/RH sector. We are now looking for LTC and RH to pilot this new benchmarking tool.

This tool will help LTC and RH’s identify, measure and report on their environmental performance; helping enable sector-wide benchmarking of energy use, water use and waste management, pollution prevention, corporate leadership, food, transportation and climate change, that can be used by senior leaders to improve decision-making to advance sustainability and environmental performance.

Assembling these metrics will be supported by a web-based tool (“online tool”) to assist LTC/RH users in collecting the scorecard data. The online tool will facilitate data tracking and monitoring for the sector and will be used to populate your own unique web-based dashboard.

While this web-based tool and dashboard are in development, LTC/RH’s have already begun reporting on their environmental and sustainability initiatives through an online questionnaire created by the Coalition.

This new LTC/RH scorecard will continue the Coalition’s focus on helping Canada’s health care organisations measure their environmental performance in a number of areas including energy use, water use and waste management, pollution prevention, corporate leadership, food, transportation and climate change. Ultimately it will provide stakeholders with important information and insights about environmental concerns and enable individual facilities to pursue funding support programs like the Save on Energy program.

To participate, express your interest to our Marketing and Outreach Coordinator, Autumn Sypus, by emailing autumn@greenhealthcare.ca.

"Using the Coalition’s existing Green Hospital Scorecard as a template, the new scorecard platform will be a game changer for operators of long-term care and retirement homes who wish to embrace environmental stewardship in a truly meaningful way. It will provide them with access to Canada’s first-ever, evidence-based evaluation tool to both help them measure their internal environmental performance and allow them to see where they stand environmentally relative to peer organisations." - Neil Ritchie, Executive Director, Canadian Coalition for Green Health Care

The project will consist of two phases:

Phase 1: Identify custom metrics for LTC and RH facilities and develop a web-based tool to gather the data

Work with selected LTC and RH sites and organisations to identify readily obtainable energy data. Data will relate to building types, energy consumption and identification of energy-conservation measures.
Create a set of online questions and key performance indicators (KPIs) that can be used to gather the data needed to develop the web-based environmental dashboard for the LTC/RH sector. The online tool will then enable participants to input their own performance data. In Phase 2, this tool will be used to generate the scorecard automatically when linked to the scorecard so that participants can more readily benchmark their performance across the sector.
Create a companion guidance document to assist participant sites in using the online tool.

Phase 2: Create the scorecard and pilot the online tool and scorecard with selected participants in the LTC/RH sector

Use data collected by the online tool to create the web-based environmental performance dashboard based on the selected sector-specific metrics.
Pilot the online tool and dashboard in a limited number of LTC and RH sites
Develop the software needed to automatically link the data in the online tool data to the web-based dashboard.
Prepare a final project report and share results with sector stakeholders via webinar (approximately March 2022).

Anyone interested in becoming involved in this new Coalition LTC/RH initiative is asked to contact Autumn Sypus at autumn@greenhealthcare.ca

Benchmarking for a Sustainable Future in Long-Term Care Homes and Retirement Homes

On May 30th, 2023 the Canadian Coalition for Green Health Care presented a webinar outlining our success in developing Canada’s new (and only) Long-Term Care Home (LTCH) and Retirement Home (RH) Scorecard for benchmarking environmental performance. The areas of focus include energy, waste, water, pollution prevention, policy and leadership, transportation, food and climate change.

Hear about the results of the pilot with LTCH's and RH's as well as watch a demonstration of the online benchmarking tool. Learn about the benefits of benchmarking your facility, including examples of best practices to reduce energy consumption, and how this tool can support decision-makers in these sectors.

You can view the presentation slides HERE.

Save on Energy Program (Financial incentives)

The Save on Energy program offers funding support to reduce energy consumption. Once you identify energy savings opportunities using the tools provided or through more comprehensive energy audits, you can consider applying to the Save on Energy program for possible funding.
Visit their resources pages which provides case studies and help build the business case for energy reduction projects: https://www.saveonenergy.ca/For-Your-Small-Business/Programs-and-Incentives

Environmental Stewardship: An implementation guide for boards, management, and clinical staff – Meeting Long Term Care Standards and beyond

This FREE downloadable guidebook provides an overview of some of the key steps and actions that senior leaders can initiate and support for their organisation to move towards a climate-resilient, carbon net-zero, and environmentally-sustainable health system. Rather than a comprehensive overview, this document is intended to be a primer to help the LTC sector with their transition to a greener system: from those starting their journey to those looking for new ideas to implement with an already robust sustainable system.
Access the guidebook: https://greenhealthcare.ca/guidebooks/