On December 11, 1980, Malcolm Baldrige was nominated as Secretary of Commerce by President Ronald Reagan. During his tenure, Baldrige played a major role in developing and implementing the United States government's administrative trade policy. Baldrige, who led the administration's efforts to pass a law on trade export practices, was later appointed by the President to preside over a trade strike at government level. He examined unfair business practices and recommended ways to end them. Baldrige's award-winning framework of excellence has contributed to long-term improvements in the economy, efficiency, and effectiveness in government. Baldrige is often quoted as saying, "Success lies in finding something you really enjoy doing and making sure you do well." The Baldrige Framework of Excellence is named after Malcolm Baldrige. Each year, the United States government presents a National Quality Award which represents the highest level of national recognition of outstanding performance that organizations can achieve in manufacturing, healthcare, education, and nonprofit sectors. Let’s learn more about Malcolm Baldrige Framework together. In the case below I will focus on a hospital setting and ask you several questions. First, let me start with some basics.
The Malcolm Baldrige Framework of excellence as shown below consists of (8) categories with (1) category focused on organizational profile, (6) categories related to processes and the last category focused on results. Various hospitals use this framework to identify and evaluate which processes to focus on to achieve better results. One of the main purposes of the framework is to help hospitals assess their efforts to improve, analyze their overall performance management system, and identify their strengths and opportunities for improvement.
As you know now Malcolm Baldrige Framework focuses on the system perspective of the whole. The perspective of systems means the management of all components, for example in the hospital as a unified whole, in order to achieve lasting success. The building blocks of the system and the integration mechanism consist of a focus on core values and concepts related to processes, results, interconnections, and improvements. Thus, the framework is relatively simple and focused on a system and process approach. I would like to appeal to hospitals in my homeland, for example, to pay attention to this framework and exploit its potential. The framework also builds well on the quality management system, complements it, and enriches it with its excellence.
The application could consist of the following steps:
1) Learning about the Malcolm Baldrige framework of excellence.
2) Development of a Malcolm Baldrige framework plan for the hospital.
3) Approval of the Malcolm Baldrige framework plan by management.
4) Hospital evaluation based on the Malcolm Baldrige framework.
Let’s zoom in on the second step; The Malcolm Baldrige framework plan for the hospital. The plan consists of a description and specific questions for each category and subcategory listed in the tables below. This is just an oversimplified example.
In closing, I believe that in this blog I managed to translate the theory into practice and offer the reader not only knowledge bases about the Malcolm Baldrige Framework but especially a set of questions ready to answer.
Some of the above questions were taken from the Baldrige Excellence Framework Examiner's manual.
It is my hope that these questions if answered will help a hospital to "look in the mirror" and find a way to satisfy, meet and even exceed the expectations not only of patients but to remain competitive and take care of your own employees, who are the soul of your hospital.
Marek