Applications for our 2025 Mountain Climber Award for Excellence in Health Equity are now open to any organization that has previously been awarded a Trailblazer Award on any topic.

The Mountain Climber Award celebrates organizations that have conducted projects to ensure that best practices in health care are equitable in terms of access, care, and outcomes for all populations that they serve.

To find out if your organization is eligible or to request an application, please email knicholas@qualityhealth.org

Learn about our Awardees projects: FHCQ Mountain Climber Award for Excellence in Health Equity Summary Report

The Mountain Climber Award for Excellence in Health Equity is given for exemplary implementation efforts that focus on embedding equity into best practices. The Foundation for Health Care Quality aligns it definition of health equity with the WHO as:

“the absence of unfair, avoidable, or remediable differences among groups of people, whether those groups are defined socially, economically, demographically, or geographically or by other dimensions of inequality (e.g., sex, gender, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation). We see health as a fundamental human right, and health equity is achieved when everyone can attain their full potential for health and well-being.”

Any organization receiving a Trail Blazer award is automatically eligible for consideration. Recipients will receive an email with a form to provide further information (supplemental data) about how your work forwards equity for the condition or populations the topic is aimed at.

The Mountain Climber Award is given out annually. A panel of judges is convened to score all the submissions on the criteria of generalizability, innovation, overcoming barriers, breadth of implementation work, (or other qualitative concepts we think will help celebrate them and that would be useful to share with others). 

Awardees will receive: 

• Award logos to display on your website, social media, and other communications to advertise your work on best practices to patients and health care partners. 
• Recognition at the Foundation for Health Care Quality conferences and on the Bree Collaborative website 
• An invitation to speak on webinars, at conferences and to be profiled in our blog 
• Other award items To Be Announced 

Mountain Climber Award criteria 

• Recipient of Trail Blazer award. 
• Submission of Mountain Climber supplemental data form. 

In 2024, the foundation started an award for Excellence in Health Equity. Our first annual awards will be formally presented in May of 2024.

Other Foundation Program Awards

The Robert Bree Collaborative gives out two awards annually, the Pathfinder Award for progress on implementing Bree Collaborative guidelines and the Trailblazer Award for demonstrating fidelity with Bree guidelines.

The Washington Patient Safety Coalition (WPSC) gives out the Speak Up! Award for recognizing healthcare staff who make the “good catches” and speak up to keep patients and staff safe.