Day six: Cleveland
Tuesday 23 March 2010
Early start today; met at 3.45am for a 6.30am flight from New York to Cleveland. As we approached our first hotel, around 11.00am, we noticed that a church, built in 1875, was on fire. It’d been struck by lightning in the night, during a severe storm. What was most unusual was that by 2.00pm the church was being demolished on safety grounds.
The church is part of the community around the Cleveland Clinic where we were going that day. The clinic kindly offered the church space within their facilities for the next six months to use as needed. The clinic campus, described as small, has two Intercontinental Hotels and a free shuttle bus to get around! Everywhere we went there was a strong culture, evident through branding and a strong 'can do’ attitude.
Cleveland Clinic is the number one hospital in the world for Cardiology and number four campus for their different specialties. They pride themselves on dealing with difficult cases from around the world. Patients, who in many cases have been diagnosed as terminal, can be brought by their Intensive Care jet to the clinic, and are treated with excellent results.
Our first meeting was with the Clinic’s Construction and Facilities Management Department. This department manages 13.5 million square feet of space across the Cleveland Campus, although in total they have 23 million square feet of space in Florida and other regional hospitals. In addition to this they are also working in Abu Dhabi.
A common problem we have in the UK is with struggling to develop apprentices into the estates and maintenance teams to balance our older workforce weighting. The team in Cleveland, however, are developing and piloting various training programmes, bringing people from college to ‘journeymen’ (qualified and experienced engineers). Just one thing we could learn from this team.
However, the attitude to sustainability in the USA is different to that in the UK, there is less awareness and agreement of the effects of Climate Change and a heavy industrial-focused local economy doesn’t exactly engender a drive towards changing behaviours. The clinic, on the other hand, is working to apply sustainability to its buildings and service delivery.
We met Christina, an architect, who was appointed to lead the clinic through their sustainability journey after her convictions in planning and sustainability were recognised by the Chief Executive Officer. Christina described to us how working closely with various department directors and the senior executive team they had started to bring sustainability into their culture. Initiatives include everything from a farmers market on campus selling local produce to a monthly news sheet and hot topics rolled out to all employees.
We finished the day off with a tour around the campus and were invited to a seminar on sustainability presented by Rose Green, an author with an interest in drainage. This could be interesting…