Advocate Christ Medical Center earns top honor

Advocate Christ Medical Center recently earned a prestigious award for its efforts to be green.

Practice Greenhealth awarded Advocate Christ with its "Top 25 Environmental Excellence Award" - its highest honor. This puts Christ (and Advocate Children's Hospital's Oak Lawn campus) among the top 25 hospitals that lead the industry in sustainability.

The Green Advocates team, led by NICU nurse Michelle Bouchard, is made up of more than 150 teammates and is instrumental in our culture of sustainability at Christ. Some projects they've implemented:

• The “Guaranteed Clean Stream” recycling program of aluminum, plastic, glass and cardboard is tailored to the campus and cleans without contamination and resulted in avoiding 34.2 tons of recycling from ending up in a landfill.

• The Greening in the OR program where the OR and Sterile Processing teams collaborate with the local Animal Welfare League to donate more than 35 tons of used sterile blue wrap, along with unused medical supplies left over after surgical cases. The campus also donates more than 44 tons of unused and expired medical supplies to Project CURE, an organization that provides global medical relief.
• Medical Device reprocessing is a key initiative driven at Christ, with teammates collecting more than four tons of used soft medical devices such as SCD sleeves, bed alarms and pressure infusion bags and deterred from ending up in a landfill.

Several other Advocate Health Care hospitals also were recognized by Practice Greenhealth, including Advocate South Suburban and Trinity hospitals. Advocate Health Care is part of Advocate Health, which also includes hospitals across the southeast and was recognized with a “System for Change Award,” earned by only nine health systems nationwide this year. Advocate Health’s 16-year streak of System for Change awards is the longest in the country, reflecting the enterprise-level commitment to sustainability.