Environmental Management Systems In Learning Organizations In Health Care

Abstract

The increase of information and knowledge is a general phenomenon and thus also applies to health care. Dynamic political and economic environments strengthen these effects. Multiple concepts addressing this challenge can be identified and “learning organizations” are one key concept in economics to handle knowledge increase and dynamic environment. Environmental Management Systems based on ISO 14001 or EMAS (Eco Management and Audit Scheme) are possible ways to extend the organization’s environmental awareness. The goal of this contribution is to analyze whether environmental management systems have this effects on (German) hospitals or not. So this chapter combines the concepts of environmental management systems and learning organizations in context of hospital organizations. After a short introduction to environmental management systems the concept of organizational learning in the three dimensions of learning levels, learning types and learning determinants is pointed out. German hospitals and their organizational attributes as the object of study are introduced next. The main part of this chapter is the analysis of organizational learning processes initiated by environmental management systems. It is shown that these processes can be found in all three learning dimensions in a hospital. So the implementation of environmental management systems could be a possibility to extend organization’s environmental awareness. At least empirical surveys are recommended to approve these mainly theoretical outcomes.