The 2026 Environmental Excellence Awards are open and will be due on Wednesday April 15.
November is a time to reflect and give thanks. At Practice Greenhealth, we have a lot to be grateful for, and want to recognize these accomplishments with you, our partners. Every day in November, we'll be sharing data to show our appreciation for all of your hard work. Today, we are grateful that facilities are increasingly embracing reusable surgical items across the board. We’re seeing a 7% increase in reusable surgical attire (now at 65%), a 7% increase in reusable blood pressure cuffs (now at 38%), and an impressive 9% increase in reusable pneumatic compression tourniquets (now at 34%). Even reusable surgical staplers doubled their adoption rate from 5% to 10%! Every reusable item means less waste heading to landfills and incinerators, and these shifts demonstrate that our partners are rethinking single-use culture in the OR.
We're pleased to share that updates for the 2026 cycle have been focused on user experience updates and increased transparency. We have:
- Cut questions on the application by 20%
- Created a new version of the Partner for Change specifically for systems to share their system-level data and their successes.
- Made the autoscore (one of the 4 scoring frameworks we use) transparent by publishing how much each question is worth on the Facility type 1 pdf of the application.
For more specifics on how the awards application has changed, check out the "What's New in 2026" video on the Metrics and Awards landing page of the Practice Greenhealth website, or join us for one of two "Excel at your Environmental Excellence Awards application" partner events to hear a walk through of those changes and ask any questions you may have:
If you have questions, need assistance or technical support, or need help setting up or updating an awards account, please contact the Awards team or call our support hotline at 888-508-0198.