2024 Environmental Services Department of the Year Awards

Health care environmental services (EVS) departments have complex jobs that touch every part of the facility. They help ensure the safety of the hospital, maintain cleanliness and bed availability, manage sustainability programs and constantly respond to staff and patient needs. And they do all these things in an environment of limited resources.

Each year, the Association for the Health Care Environment recognizes leading EVS departments with the EVS Department of the Year Awards. The awards highlight the outstanding achievements of cutting-edge EVS teams in maintaining high levels of performance in cleaning, disinfecting, infection prevention, environmental sustainability and stewardship, technology use, patient satisfaction, and education and training in critical areas.

Winner profiles

500-plus beds winner: Orlando Regional Medical Center

250-499 beds winner: Munson Medical Center

1-249 beds winner: Geisinger Bloomsburg Hospital

The winners for 2024 handled the challenges before them with innovation and consistent, thoughtful effort. They demonstrated through data and examples that they are among the best in the country. Their inspirational stories reveal the deep importance of health care EVS departments to the overall success of hospitals.

Involvement in cutting-edge research projects, such as one that identified potential infection-related problems with cubicle curtains, has been a highlight in recent years for the EVS department at Orlando (Fla.) Regional Medical Center, winner of the 500-plus beds category. That department also led the way in sustainability efforts by creating an in-house manufacturing facility for two important cleaning chemicals and recently initiated a QR code tagging system that ensures mattresses are tracked and changed as needed.

The EVS department at Munson Medical Center in Traverse City, Mich., which claimed the top spot in the 250-499 beds category, played an essential role in the hospital’s strategic plan to improve discharge turnover and patient admission times by reprioritizing work and assigning a leader to the effort. An effort to improve the culture of that department through leader accessibility, employee engagement and a defined career ladder paid dividends in 2023, as did a new formal, multistep interview process.

The EVS staff at Geisinger Bloomsburg (Pa.) Hospital, the winner in the 1-249 beds category, succeeded by recognizing that although they are not clinicians, they still deeply impact patient care. In 2023, they added the cleaning of emergency department spaces between patients to their workload, which freed nurses to focus on patient care. They also partnered with a vendor to improve a key floor cleaning procedure and tapped technology to upgrade their communications.

“What impressed me about all the winners this year is that they put time into the people,” says Ed Barr, CHESP, FAHE, EVS director for Sodexo Health Care Services at Redeemer Health in Pennsylvania, who was a member of the Review Task Force that selected the winners. “As a result, the people stay, and the people produce. And people in this profession do their work at a very high standard. We’re in health care, so you’ve got to make sure that it’s done correctly because lives are on the line.”

Certificates of Merit

• 500-plus beds // The Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
• 250-499 beds // CaroMont Regional Medical Center, Gastonia, N.C.
• 1-249 beds // Medstar Harbor Hospital, Baltimore

Review task force 

• Ed Barr, CHESP, FAHE, EVS, director for Sodexo Health Care Services at Redeemer Health in Pennsylvania.
• Gary S. McCarthy, AAET, BFMC, VHA-CM, FAC-COR II, program manager for health care environment and facilities programs at the Veterans Health Administration.
• Randall Manno, MBA, MHA, CHESP, CMIP, T-CHEST, T-CSCT, senior director for EVS at Dallas Children's Hospital.
• Shawna Brown, director of post-acute care and federal member services at the American Hospital Association.

Ed Avis is a freelance writer based in Chicago.