Mission and Goals

• Our Mission and Vision
• Campaign Goals

Our Mission and Vision

Just as the Hippocratic Oath promises to, "first, do no harm," health care providers have a responsibility to eliminate practices that harm people and the environment.

Together with our partners around the world, Health Care Without Harm shares a vision of a health care sector that does no harm, and instead promotes the health of people and the environment. To that end, we are working to implement ecologically sound and healthy alternatives to health care practices that pollute the environment and contribute to disease.

The mission of Health Care Without Harm is to transform the health care sector worldwide, without compromising patient safety or care, so that it is ecologically sustainable and no longer a source of harm to public health and the environment.

To find out how to join the Campaign, please contact us.

Campaign Goals

Health Care Without Harm has eight core goals.

• Create markets and policies
  for safer products, materials and chemicals in health care. Promote safer substitutes, including products that avoid mercury, polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastic and brominated flame retardants
• Eliminate incineration
  of medical waste, minimize the amount and toxicity of all waste generated and promote safer waste treatment practices
• Transform the design, construction and operations
  of health care facilities to minimize environmental impacts and foster healthy, healing environments
• Encourage food purchasing systems
  that support sustainable food production and distribution, and provide healthy food on-site at health care facilities
• Secure a safe and healthy workplace
  for all health care workers
• Ensure patients, workers and communities have full access to information
  about chemicals used in health care and can participate in decisions about exposures to chemicals
• Promote human rights and environmental justice
  for communities impacted by the health care sector, while assuring that problems are not displaced from one community or country to another
• Address climate change
  by improving energy practices and reducing the overall climate footprint of the health care sector