The ENA Lantern Award recognizes emergency departments that demonstrate exceptional and innovative performance in leadership, practice, education, advocacy and research. The award is a way to showcase your ED’s accomplishments in incorporating evidence-based practice and innovation into emergency care, and a visible symbol of your commitment to quality, safety, and a healthy work environment.

Your ENA Lantern Award Story

The ENA Lantern Award application asks you to tell your story. What you are proud of and what you do well is the story ENA wants to hear.

The Lantern Award application includes quantitative questions that focus on performance and outcome metrics, as well as qualitative questions about noteworthy practices and attributes of your emergency department. The qualitative questions require brief narratives or longer descriptive exemplars that highlight your emergency department’s excellence and innovation.

Your story, as you define it in your application, will cover each of these core areas:

• Leadership – Practice: qualities that foster professional pride, confidence and a community of support for emergency nurses
• Leadership – Operations: operational improvement activities and development of systems and processes
• Education: instilling knowledge and competency through quality and accessible education
• Advocacy: how the future of the emergency nursing profession and quality patient care are influenced through advocacy and innovation in your emergency department
• Research – Practice: advancing the emergency nursing profession and practice through quality improvement, research and the evaluation of clinical outcomes.

Lantern Award recipients receive a physical award to display in their emergency department as well as recognition through ENA publications, conferences, and the ENA website. In addition, award recipients are entitled to use an official Lantern Award seal in communications and advertising for the duration of the award period (e.g., in email signatures, on your website).

The Lantern Award is open to all emergency departments who complete the online application. The award period is three years and recipients have the option of re-applying at the end of their award period.

Getting Started

The first step on your journey to the Lantern Award is to review the Handbook, Coaching Guide, and FAQs completely to determine whether you can provide the measures and stories of excellence that are required to become an award recipient.

The 2025 (Cycle 15) online application is now available.

The application submission deadline is Feb. 27.

Below is the Cycle 15 application timeline:

• Nov. 13: Link to online application available
• Feb. 27: Application submission deadline
• March 30: Application fee of $3,000 due
• Nov. 13-March 20: ENA staff review each application as submitted to ensure de-identification and contact applicants with any questions
• Jan. 1-March 20: Lantern Committee receives extensive reviewer training and review sample applications. Interrater reliability analyses are completed to ensure scoring is within one standard deviation.
• Ongoing: ENA staff assign three reviewers to each application
• March 30-May 30: Lantern Committee reviews, scores and provides feedback for assigned applications
• May 30-June 30: ENA staff compile scores. All applicants receiving an overall minimum of 80 percent are award recipients.
• July 1-30: Recipients and non-recipients notified of outcomes

Please contact LanternAward@ena.org with any questions.

Meet the ENA Lantern Award Recipients

Before diving into your hospital's application, visit ENA's Hall of Honor to meet previous ENA Lantern Award recipients.