Providence caregivers drive environmental stewardship
[6 MIN READ]
In this article:
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As a global leader in integrating environmental stewardship into health systems, Providence understands the importance of engaging health care workers.
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Our WE ACT Engagement Score is an innovative tool for measuring local engagement in environmental stewardship initiatives.
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As we continue to feel the impact of climate change, we encourage other health care organizations to foster a culture of environmental stewardship and accountability.
Health care systems contribute 8.5% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, according to The Commonwealth Fund. Providence is a global innovator in prioritizing and integrating environmental stewardship into health care practices. Engaging caregivers is what drives these efforts and improves environmental outcomes.
“We’ve made a lot of progress because of key engaged and passionate caregivers across the system that have taken it upon themselves to push the work forward,” says Oriana Turley, RN, program manager of environmental stewardship at Providence.
The importance of engaging health care workers
“The system environmental stewardship team supports the efforts of local caregivers at each hospital across the organization,” Turley says. “We can create frameworks, provide information and use data to justify the work, but we need boots on the ground doing the work for it to progress. The overarching goal with engagement is weaving that thread of environmental stewardship through every facet of the organization.”
Engagement helps foster a culture of accountability. For change to happen, health care systems can’t continue doing work the way it has always been done. Caregivers are experts in advocating for evolving practices and policies where they work.
“Caregiver engagement is our secret sauce at Providence,” Turley says. “We need everybody in a variety of job roles to be able to do this work.”
Here’s how we engage:
Awarding Environmental Stewardship Champion Hospitals
In 2024, we implemented an internal awards system – Environmental Stewardship Champion Hospitals – to recognize and motivate caregivers’ contributions to environmental stewardship in our three pillars: WE ACT, We REACH and We SHARE.
“We want to ensure that we’re recognizing individual hospitals, teams and people,” Turley says.
The process of gathering information to apply for our internal awards also serves as an avenue for local green team members and engaged health care workers to learn more about the environmental stewardship work being done at their hospital.
The 2025 Environmental Stewardship Champion Hospitals application process involves five steps:
- Collect metrics via the WE ACT Profile Score (found on our innovative environmental stewardship data dashboard, the Engagement Score (explained below) and the area of focus (electricity, anesthesia or waste reduction)
- Gather successes by sharing one story in each of the following categories: WE ACT (mitigation), We REACH (resilience) and We SHARE (advocacy)
- Share goals by creating five environmental stewardship SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Timely) goals
- Submit
- Earn recognition, which includes a certificate for the ministry, a letter of recognition to leadership and recognition at a monthly Action Collaborative for Environmental Stewardship (ACES) meeting in which health workers collaborate to share best practices, educate, engage and inspire.
Turley says one of the larger goals of the internal awards is to familiarize people with the data and metrics available on the WE ACT Scorecard.
“If you’re doing the work, you’re going to get recognition,” Turley says. “But also, through the application process, you will learn about environmental stewardship work already happening at your hospital, and you will get familiar with the data available for your hospital, which is often so encouraging for people passionate about this topic.”
Developing the We ACT Engagement Score
The WE ACT Engagement Score is a tool for measuring ministry environmental stewardship engagement. All caregivers can access their ministry’s Engagement Score on the WE ACT Scorecard.
Answering “yes” or “no” to each of the seven pillars of engagement results in an Engagement Score with a top score of 10. These pillars include:
- Dedicated Environmental Stewardship Staff
- Environmental Stewardship Communications
- Green Team
- Award Application
- Volunteer Activity
- Board Presentation
- Recognition or Publicity
“We want to make sure that if people want to improve their environmental stewardship program, they have all the tools that they need, including recommended actions based on data,” Turley says.
Creating Green Teams
Green Teams are localized groups of passionate caregivers who directly impact environmental initiatives within their ministries. There is a mix of regional and hospital specific Green Teams. We started our first Green Team in 1993. Today, we have 28 Green Teams representing 48 hospitals across seven regions.
To support this initiative within our ministries and beyond, in 2024, we launched the Providence Center for Environmental Stewardship to share our environmental stewardship learnings with the health care sector. On the website for the center, we provide a Green Team Toolkit to help others incorporate Green Teams within their own organizations.
“Our most successful green teams are led by extremely engaged and knowledgeable people on the ground,” Turley says. “We want to amplify that energy and passion.”
A look at Saint John’s Green Team
Sr. Sara Tarango, CSJ, a Sister of St. Joseph of Orange and environmental stewardship liaison in Southern California for Providence is a member of Saint John’s Health Center’s Green Team in Santa Monica. Sr. Sara has a firsthand understanding of the importance of engaging health care workers in environmental stewardship.
“They are the ones on the floors who see the opportunities for improvement every day,” she says. “They have the ideas. They are the ones asking the good questions – how can this be done differently?”
Saint John’s Green Team has accomplished a lot in its first year. The team has:
- Created a Green Team charter
- Applied for the Practice Greenhealth Award
- Achieved a Partner for Change Award from Practice Greenhealth
- Organized a successful Earth Day event
- Launched a recycling program
- Increased renewal collections by 15%
- Held educational sessions at meetings
- Presented to the Quality Safety Board and Hospital Council
- Assisted with the nitrous oxide central supply system deactivation
Sr. Sara says she and the Green Team chair, Cynthia Ruiz, assistant director of Environmental Services at Saint John’s, were both exceptionally proud of the Earth Day event, which included tables near Saint John’s cafeteria with a photo booth, a shred bin for personal documents, a pledge card to sign promising to do something “green,” drawings for children to color and education on recycling.
“Everyone on the Green Team enthusiastically came together to either contribute ideas for the event or participate on the day of the event,” Sr. Sara says. “It was also the launch of the ministry’s recycling program.”
Receiving Practice Greenhealth Awards and The Joint Commission Sustainable Healthcare Certification
Practice Greenhealth’s Environmental Excellence Awards, in partnership with Healthcare Without Harm, grants environmental excellence in health care awards globally.
The robust application process allows green team members and engaged health care workers to learn more about environmental stewardship at their local hospitals by gathering the detailed information needed to apply.
“It encourages applicants to dig deep into the inner workings of their hospitals,” Turley says. “Take waste as an example. There are so many instances where a hospital has no idea of the quantity of waste it produces. It makes people assess, look at anecdotal alongside hard data points and then build programs.”
Providence is proud to have 32 hospitals apply for Practice Greenhealth’s Environmental Excellence Awards in 2025, with several receiving the Top 25 Environmental Excellence Award in years past, Practice Greenhealth’s highest honor.
“We’re working hard to create roadmaps for uncharted territory,” Turley says.
Caregiver engagement also is reflected in The Joint Commission Sustainable Healthcare Certification process. Providence is the first large health care system to earn The Joint Commission Sustainable Healthcare Certification for 100% of its hospitals.
Leaning in on local-level empowerment
“As a nurse, when I walked through the doors at the hospital, my personal values around the environment felt misaligned with my professional actions,” Turley says. “I was contributing to a problem, just throwing away tons of single-use stuff every single day. And I felt terrible about it, but I didn’t know what else to do. It was just the way that I was taught to practice bedside nursing. Those were the tools available to me.”
A robust environmental stewardship program empowers all caregivers.
“We need local-level empowerment and engagement to think more critically about applying an environmental stewardship lens to the work we do at the bedside,” Turley says. “We need to keep talking about it, advocating for it and doing the work where we see the opportunities. That takes every single caregiver across the organization. Without that local momentum and advocacy, we would not be able to have the success that we’ve had, and we wouldn’t be able to push the envelope further moving forward.”
Join us!
We encourage all health care organizations to adopt similar strategies to engage their health care workers in environmental stewardship. For more information:
- Visit our Providence Center for Environmental Stewardship
- Read our Providence Environmental Stewardship stories
- Check out our Providence Toolkits and Resources
Contributing caregivers
Oriana Turley, RN, is the program manager of environmental stewardship at Providence.
Sr. Sara Tarango, CSJ, a Sister of St. Joseph of Orange, is the environmental stewardship liaison in Southern California for Providence and a member of Saint John’s Health Center’s Green Team in Santa Monica.
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Related resources
Celebrating stewardship: Honoring Practice Greenhealth winners
Environmental Stewardship at Providence: 2024 Year in Review
Looking forward: 2025 and beyond
This information is not intended as a substitute for professional medical care. Always follow your health care professional’s instructions.
