The Background Information
The Baldrige Award
The Baldrige Award is managed by the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program, nation’s public-private partnership that exists to raise the community awareness of performance excellence (About Us, 2014). The program sets standards for performance excellence, teaches leaders of various organizations, including businesses, educational establishments, and healthcare centers, how to meet those standards, creates assessment tools on their basis, and gives the Baldrige Award to the best.
The Baldrige Award was created in 1987 (The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Improvement Act, 2013). The reward is named in honor of Malcolm Baldrige, who was 26th Secretary of Commerce and was known for his unique managerial excellence that became the cause of significant improvements in the government.
St. David’s Healthcare
St. David’s Healthcare refers to a huge hospital system (the fourth largest in its area) that operates in Texas (2014 Award Recipient, 2015). The system includes hospitals, EDs, surgery centers, urgent care clinics, and rehabilitation centers (2014 Award Recipient, 2015, par. 1). St. David’s Healthcare is also one of the largest employers in its area. Currently, the hospital system has over 8,000 of employees (2014 Award Recipient, 2015, par. 1).
The financial indicators of SDH are rather high. In 2013, the net revenue reached the point of 1.4 billion dollars (2014 Award Recipient, 2015, par. 1). St. David’s Healthcare got the Baldrige Award in November 2014 and became the first hospital system in the Texas area to be rewarded with it (Baldrige Award, 2014).
What Areas of the Baldrige Award Criteria Framework were and were not Covered by St. David’s Healthcare?
The official news release about the awarding of St. David’s Healthcare tells, in which areas of performance excellence the hospital system has shown the best score (Baldrige Award, 2014).
First of all, SGH has exclusively high operational standards that help to improve patient outcomes and save lives. As a prime example, St. David’s Healthcare is famous because of the way it deals with the most severe cases of heart attacks. SDH has a very short “door-to-balloon time”, which can be defined as the time that passes between the moment a patient arrives in the hospital and the moment he or she receives needed intervention (Baldrige Award, 2014, par. 2).
Secondly, this hospital system has proven that it deserves the Baldrige Award because of its workforce policies. SDH has been included in the list of “top 100 best places to work” created by Modern Healthcare and was recognized as the “Texas Employer of the Year” according to the statement of the Texas Workforce Commission (Baldrige Award, 2014, par. 3).
In 2010, St. David’s Healthcare conducted a study among employees to get the feedback and improved the drawbacks that it revealed. Besides, training programs for nurses are provided, which results in extremely high levels of retention.
Another reason for SDH to be awarded is its customer focus. SDH hospitals track patient satisfaction and address all possible complaints (Baldrige Award, 2014, par. 4). St. David’s Healthcare has a large pool of loyal customers, and the number of loyal customers significantly increases from year to year.
The hospital system is also good at measurement and analysis, as it can be concluded, considering all the studies it conducts. SDH tracks the satisfaction of both its customers and employees, assesses the success of ongoing strategies, evaluates the level of growth, and so on. St. David’s Healthcare understands the necessity of innovation and the research.
In 2013, it received the top honor of Professional Research Consultants as “an organization that pushes the healthcare industry to innovate ways to provide better experiences for employees, physicians and patients” (Baldrige Award, 2014, par. 2).
Finally, the organization shows great results of its work, which can be proven by its financial performance. SDH’s net revenue has increased by 70 percent between 2007 and 2013 (Baldrige Award, 2014, par. 5). Due to its enormous revenues, St. David’s Healthcare is able to reinvest. It invests not only in the medical research or in the studies aimed to show the level of customer and employee satisfaction but also in community programs and uncompensated care (Baldrige Award, 2014, par. 6).
According to the Baldrige Excellence Framework (2015), the organization is evaluated according to seven criteria: Leadership, Strategy, Customers, Measurement, analysis and knowledge management, Workforce, Operations, and Results. The news release does not talk about Leadership at all, so this area is probably not so well covered as the remaining ones. Still, St. David’s Healthcare admits that “performance improvement never ends”, so they will try to make an even greater difference (Baldrige Award, 2014, par. 4).
References
2014 Award Recipient, Health Care Category. (2015). Web.
About Us. (2014). Web.
Baldrige Award. (2014). Web.
Baldrige Excellence Framework. (2015). Web.
The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Improvement Act of 1987. (2013). Web.