A Calling Forged in Crisis
The flickering television screen in young Colleen Groll’s living room did more than broadcast the evening news—it shaped a life’s purpose. Each night, images of wounded soldiers in Vietnam stirred something deep within her. By the time the war ended during her junior year of high school, her path was already set: she would become a nurse. Years of intensive care experience only deepened her commitment to healing, though a transformative moment came not in the ICU, but during a routine checkup with a nurse practitioner. “My goodness, what a wonderful role,” she realized, seeing how this advanced practice position blended clinical expertise with holistic patient relationships.
When Renovation Meets Revelation
While building her nursing career, Groll discovered an unexpected parallel passion—home renovation. What began as a practical hobby soon became a laboratory for sustainable innovation. She found herself poring over energy-efficient designs and non-toxic building materials, eventually transitioning to professional green building consulting. For five years at O’Brien & Company, she helped architects and developers reduce environmental impacts—yet something felt incomplete. Then came the job postings that would change everything: hospital sustainability positions. “I couldn’t get over that I could combine these two passions,” she recalls of the moment healthcare and environmentalism converged in her mind.
Transforming Seattle Children’s from Within
When Groll joined Seattle Children’s Hospital in 2013 as Sustainability Manager, she brought a nurse’s clinical insight and a builder’s systems-thinking to her new role. Walking the hospital corridors, she saw opportunities everywhere: the whirring HVAC systems gulping energy, the endless streams of single-use plastics, the parking lots filled with idling cars. Unlike residential projects with clear completion dates, this work felt limitless. “I was never going to run out of things to work on,” she says with characteristic enthusiasm. Her approach mirrors nursing’s triage system—prioritizing the “big three” of energy, waste, and water reduction while confronting the complex beast of medical supply chains.
The Plastic Paradox
Nowhere is the tension between patient care and planetary health more apparent than in Groll’s daily struggle with medical plastics. “Hospitals purchase thousands and thousands of items,” she explains, describing the delicate balance between infection control protocols and sustainability goals. Each sterile wrapped instrument, every disposable gown represents both a lifeline for patients and an environmental burden. This is where Groll’s nursing background proves invaluable—she speaks the language of clinicians while advocating for change, whether introducing reprocessed devices or challenging vendors about excessive packaging.
Climate Action as Patient Care
Groll’s most powerful insight reframes sustainability not as an add-on, but as core to the hospital’s mission. “Climate change should be a public health issue, not a political one,” she insists, noting how children—Seattle Children’s primary patients—are especially vulnerable to heat waves, poor air quality, and vector-borne diseases. Her presentations to staff blend Nurses Climate Challenge data with local impacts: how wildfire smoke increases pediatric asthma admissions, how supply chain disruptions from extreme weather affect medication availability. The response has been revelatory—neonatal nurses now discuss climate resilience with parents, while maintenance teams compete to reduce energy use in their units.
The Ripple Effect
True to her nursing roots, Groll measures success not just in kilowatt-hours saved, but in changed mindsets. After her grand rounds presentation, NICU nurses began questioning whether every diaper really needed to be double-bagged. Anesthesiologists started turning off gas valves between procedures. What began as one nurse-builder’s unconventional career path has become an institutional movement—proof that healthcare’s healing mission must extend beyond individual patients to the environment that sustains us all. As Groll often reminds her colleagues: “Every sustainable choice we make here is a dose of prevention for our community.”
Epilogue: The View from the Hospital Garden
On rare quiet afternoons, you might find Groll checking on the hospital’s pollinator garden—a living metaphor for her work. Just as the flowers support struggling bee populations, her efforts help healthcare systems nurture rather than deplete their environments. The girl who once watched war reports now witnesses a different kind of frontline—where nurses, builders, and sustainability professionals collaborate to create healing spaces that don’t come at the earth’s expense. It’s a battle she fights with equal parts pragmatism and hope, one recycled glove and solar panel at a time.
