From a publishing standpoint, there is no more exciting event than the launch of a new publication. The thought of opening up a communication channel that didn’t exist before on freshly emerging topics is highly gratifying. What is particularly noteworthy, to us as publishers, about the launch of Clean Design and Operations is that it is new in so many ways.

First, it is addressing the “hot” new topic of sustainability, a concept gaining increasingly widespread public attention and support. Second, the magazine focuses on the even more recent manifestation of sustainability in the healthcare field—a field that, ironically enough (the concept being so largely health-centered), has lagged behind other socioeconomic sectors in “going green.”

But the “newness” goes beyond topicality to elements that are striking from a purely publishing perspective. Clean Design and Operations (or CD&O) is violating some “rules” for controlled-circulation publications—i.e., publications that are advertiser-supported and carefully define their audiences for that reason. First, the magazine’s circulation cuts across several readership interest groups: architects, interior designers, hospital executives, clinicians, food service directors, maintenance engineers, and more. In the “normal” world of controlled circulation publishing, this would be viewed as offering potentially “waste” circulation to advertisers who traditionally prefer to focus on a particular interest group. Not so for CD&O.

Second, its coverage cuts across many areas of activity pertaining to healthcare facilities—specifically, the details of design and operations. From an editorial standpoint, this represents a potential loss of focus. Again, not so for CD&O.

The reason that these publishing shibboleths don’t apply to this magazine arises from yet another new concept gaining widespread recognition and support in healthcare: the importance of multidisciplinary teamwork. As Laura Brannen, executive director of one of our publishing partners, Hospitals for a Healthy Environment (H2E), so eloquently points out in her welcoming editorial “Shades of Green” (p. 6), no matter how sustainably designed a facility might be, it cannot consider itself to be truly “green” if its operations continue to contribute to waste and unhealthy environments. All disciplines must work together to achieve this. The thinking, therefore, is that each of our articles will appeal for one useful reason or another to all of our readers. They need the information, and communication, to make the necessary teamwork happen.

For, as Anna Gilmore Hall, RN, executive director of another publishing partner, Health Care Without Harm (HCWH), notes in her editorial “Going Mainstream” (p.5), substantial rewards await those healthcare facilities that implement “top-to-bottom green building and operations efforts.”

But first they may have to get over “the shock of the new.” We, the publishers of Clean Design and Operations, and our in-field partners are eager to get the process started.

RICHARD L. PECK, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF