This paper investigates the Education for Sustainable Development in international and Greek Universities. It further aims to investigate how Greek students comprehend the Sustainable Development (SD) issues and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and support, as future managers, its added value concerning the environmental, social and corporate governance management in the Greek Business Community. For this purpose, a literature review and a field research among Greek Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs) students has been conducted. The field research and other relevant researches conclude that the Greek HEIs have followed the international trends and started implementing CSR and Sustainable Development courses in their curriculum. Furthermore, they state that SD and CSR courses are very important for the shaping of a business ethics management, an environmentally friendly behavior and promote the stakeholders interests. Moreover, the field researches find there are strong parallels between the CSR orientation of Greek students and students and managers in other countries. For this reason, Greek Companies could play a significant role at this point, by allowing students to participate in their CSR initiatives. For Greek Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs) and students the SD and CSR, is more than just another scientific subject, as it is a way of completely altering existing way of business management, decision making and market behavior. Therefore, Greek Higher Educational Institutions and students argue that Sustainable Development
The international health care system, as well as the Greek health care system under the current climate change problems and the sustainable development goals solutions just begin to understand the impact that environmental and social issues will have on health care services. Greek hospitals and the Greek health care system have the potential not only to adapt to climate change, but also in the process to promote social value, greater social equity and environmental health through sustainable development goals. At the same time, based on a different perspective, social responsibility, environmental management and governance are at the forefront of attention, not only as the most up-to-date characteristics of a hospital strategy, but also in relation to national and international economic policies aiming for better economic results for local communities and stakeholders. In other words, environmental, social and governance issues are today incorporated to sustainable hospital management and have already become part of the Greek Sustainable Health Care System. In this paper the literature review suggests that sustainable health care could be a driver of sustainability in the health care system and specifically in the Greek Hospitals. The empirical research analysis in the Greek hospitals recognized that in the recent years remarkable steps for environmental and social issues have been made. However, according to sustainable management theory, as this is referred in the paper, in order to achieve sustainability in the Greek health care system through sustainable health care management, is necessary to promote, rebuild and adapt the health care system to a concrete holistic sustainable health care management, which is supported and evaluated by the Greek Ministry of Health and the Greek health care market.
The continuous operation and the specialized conditions needed for safely delivering healthcare services make hospitals among the most expensive buildings. Several studies in different countries have investigated the potential role and contribution of macroscopic indices of hospitals in total energy requirements. In this work, we tried to investigate the energy requirements of Greek hospitals in terms of cost. We collected data from all public hospitals in Greece over a 2 year period (2018–2019) and evaluated the contribution of various factors in the total energy cost. The data revealed large variability by region and by hospital, even regarding structures of the same category and size. The analysis also showed that structural and operational data of each hospital differently influence the hospitals’ energy requirements. Using regression methods, we developed two models for calculating annual energy costs. One only contains hospital structural data (number of beds, type of hospital, number of employees, and the non/use of alternative energy sources such as natural gas), and it reached an R² of 0.84. The second model contains not only structural but also operational data from each hospital (number of the internal patients, number of surgeries and number of medical imaging tests), and it reached an R² of 0.87. The former model is easier to compute since it only relies on data that can be easily gathered, but the latter has slightly better performance. These tools can help the Ministry of Health and hospitals’ management to identify the factors that contribute to the energy cost in order to plan targeted interventions, be well-prepared regarding budgeting, and be able to progressively measure, monitor, and improve the environmental footprint of hospitals by investing in renewable energy resources.
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