Celebrating excellence, advancing the field

Every year at The International Summit & Exhibition on Health Facility Planning, Design & Construction™ (PDC Summit™), The Center for Health Design has the privilege of bringing our community together to celebrate excellence in the health care design profession through our annual awards program.

The Healthcare Environment Awards, Touchstone Awards and the Changemaker Award are, at their core, about recognition — but they also are about something much bigger. They are about celebrating a field, documenting its evolution and passing knowledge from one generation of professionals to the next.

Awards have a unique power. They give us pause and invite us to look around the room and recognize what we are building together. In health care design, that matters. Our work is complex, collaborative and often invisible once buildings are occupied and systems are running. The awards allow us to acknowledge the intention, rigor and care behind the environments and leadership that truly make a difference.

For decades, these awards have served as an annual yearbook for the field — capturing trends, innovations and shifts in thinking. When you look back at past award recipients, you can see how priorities have changed: the growing emphasis on evidence-based design (EBD), the integration of behavioral and mental health considerations, the rise of patient- and family-centered care and the expanding role of interdisciplinary collaboration. These awards help us monitor and document the growth of the field itself.

Our Healthcare Environment Awards recognize projects that pair creative, high-quality design with measurable outcomes. Since first presented in 1989, these awards have honored firms large and small for strategic and innovative design concepts, collaborative team processes and evidence-informed decision-making across a wide range of health care settings. Juried by respected experts, submissions are evaluated not only for design excellence but also for how research, strategy and collaboration contribute to better outcomes.

The Touchstone Awards recognize not just outcomes but process. These coveted awards honor exemplary use of an EBD process through projects and products that demonstrate excellence across the three core touchstones of EBD: collaboration, evaluation and sharing. This is about how teams work — how they bring diverse voices together, rigorously assess what matters and openly share what they learn so others can benefit.

The Touchstone Awards aren’t won, they’re earned, bestowing the highest honors on practitioners of the EBD process. These professionals, working alongside their colleagues, clients and project teams, have applied the EBD process across a wide range of projects and products to improve health, safety, wellness, value and outcomes — while meaningfully engaging stakeholders along the way. With rigorous review by respected veterans in the field, a Touchstone Award signals a deep commitment to evidence-based thinking and practice. While originally focused on health care environments, products of any type that thoughtfully employ an EBD process are now eligible.

The Changemaker Award allows us to shine a light on individual or organizational achievement and leadership. Through the Changemaker Keynote conversation, a plenary session held at the PDC Summit, we use storytelling to pass wisdom from one generation to another. These conversations are not just about career milestones; they’re about values, lessons learned and the courage it takes to challenge assumptions and push the field forward.

That in-person gathering is itself a critical part of the awards’ impact. Presenting these awards at the PDC Summit allows us to celebrate collectively — to applaud colleagues, reconnect with peers and strengthen the sense of community that defines health care design.

Because this issue of Health Facilities Management — with expanded circulation tied to the PDC Summit — includes our awards section, it presents a unique opportunity not only to honor this year’s recipients but to tell a broader story about the awards themselves. It’s also an opportunity to invite new voices into the process. We want to encourage more firms, health care organizations and teams to consider submitting their work. If you’ve ever wondered whether your project is award-worthy, I would argue that the act of submission alone — reflecting on your process, documenting outcomes and sharing lessons learned — adds value to the field.

If you would like to learn more about award opportunities, criteria, deadlines and the application process, you can visit our website at healthdesign.org/awards. At their best, awards are not about competition but connection. They help us celebrate who we are as a field, where we’ve been and where we’re going. They capture stories that deserve to be shared and ensure that knowledge doesn’t stay siloed but continues to circulate, inspire and evolve.

I hope you’ll take time to explore the awards section in this issue, celebrate the recipients and consider how your own work might contribute to this ongoing story. We look forward to continuing the tradition — together — at the PDC Summit and beyond.

About this column

“From The Center” is by the leadership of The Center for Health Design and appears in alternating issues of Health Facilities Management magazine.

Debra Levin, Hon. FASID, EDAC, president and chief executive officer, The Center for Health Design.