Shirley Ryan AbilityLab receives new Sustainability Award from The Joint Commission
Shirley Ryan AbilityLab receives new Sustainability Award from The Joint Commission
By sydney | Published: 2025-10-07 20:14:00 | Source: Crothall Healthcare
Shirley RYan abilityyLab Earn new Joint Commission Sustainability AwardÂ
With support from Compass One Healthcare, Shirley Ryan AbilityLab has reached another milestone in its commitment to environmental stewardship.Â
The Chicago-based rehabilitation hospital, known for treating patients with stroke, spinal cord and brain injuries, has received a new healthcare sustainability certification from The Joint Commission. It is the first hospital in Illinois and the first rehabilitation hospital in the country to receive this recognition.Â
At the heart of this effort is Lamar Davis, Managing Director of Compass One Healthcare at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab. Known as the hospital’s “sustainability expert,” Davis has overseen sustainability initiatives since the facility opened eight years ago. Coordinates efforts across Compass One service lines, including Environmental Services, Food and Nutrition Services, Facilities Management, and Clinical Engineering.Â
“Many of the sustainability programs in the Compass One portfolio have been the backbone of our customers’ success in achieving this certification,” said Carter Berry, Regional Director of Operations. “Lamar has extensive knowledge of these programs and worked closely with hospital leadership to accomplish everything required to achieve certification.”Â
Helping the client achieve sustainabilityÂ
Since the hospital opened in 2017, sustainability has become a core value. Early efforts included measuring carbon dioxide emissions and developing standards to guide long-term improvements. Since then, energy use, carbon emissions and waste generation have decreased dramatically. Recycling continues to expand, and leadership is exploring renewable energy options, including wind and solar power.Â
When The Joint Commission announced its new sustainability certification program in January 2024, Davis immediately saw an opportunity.Â
“We have had a sustainability program since the hospital opened, and this certification has helped us take a fresh look at our efforts and make them stronger,” he said.Â
With approval from hospital leadership, Davis led the work of compiling data, drafting a strategic sustainability plan and operations plan, and guiding both through board review. Certification was completed in January 2025.Â
More improvements comingÂ
Looking ahead, Davis and his team are committed to reducing CO2 emissions by 3-5% by 2030. Each service line has set specific targets to support this work:Â
- Environmental Services: Improve recycling by 5% through employee education, compliance audits, and targeted reminders.Â
- Food services: Launching the composting process at the hospital level and training the nursing staff to divert patients’ food waste from the general waste bin.Â
- Clinical Engineering: Increase battery recycling through employee training, waste audits, and IT partnering for proper disposal.Â
- Facilities Management: Reduce energy use by 2% (stretch goal: 5%) through facility monitoring, new technologies, and nightly setbacks at off-site facilities.Â
Achieving long-term goalsÂ
These steps will move the hospital closer to its overarching goal: reducing its carbon footprint by 40% by 2030. Plans include reducing energy consumption by 15%, doubling recycling rates from 20% to 40%, and increasing the use of renewable energy sources.Â
The certification will be valid until 2027, at which time the Joint Commission will review progress toward achieving these goals.Â
“We are always proud to help the hospital achieve success and be recognized as a leader,” Perry said. “With Lamar working closely with senior leadership, we will continue to build a sustainability program that can serve as a model for other hospitals.”Â
ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
