ASQ To Teach Baldrige Quality Concepts To Healthcare Pros
Attendees will learn how to implement Baldrige criteria as a method to enhance quality in a healthcare setting.
Milwaukee - The American Society for Quality is offering intensive classes designed for healthcare professionals, or those interested in improving quality in healthcare, to help them understand and implement the core values and criteria of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. "Taking the Baldrige Road to Excellent Healthcare Results," a two-day course, will be offered in Phoenix and Atlanta this fall.
The Baldrige award is presented annually by the President of the United States to organizations that demonstrate quality and performance excellence. Three awards may be given each year in five categories, including healthcare. Recipients are selected based on achievement and improvement in seven areas, known as the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence. These are: Leadership; strategic planning; customer and market focus; measurement, analysis, and knowledge management; human resource focus; process management; and business/organizational performance results.
The course content is ideal for any healthcare organization planning to use Baldrige internal assessment as a performance improvement system or to apply for the prestigious, national quality performance excellence award. Medical centers, clinics, hospitals of all sizes, and other healthcare facilities are invited to send personnel so they can learn how to improve interactions at all levels and between all stakeholders on the quest for organizational excellence.
"The keys to organizational performance excellence lie in a systematic approach to understanding the interactions of all the pieces and parts of a healthcare operation and to aligning them efficiently and effectively to achieve its purpose," says Jerry Mairani, ASQ president. "The components of the Baldrige criteria afford the chance to look at those major systems and focus on opportunities for improvement that go beyond the individual unit and extend to the whole organization. Using the criteria as a guide, healthcare facilities can steadily improve interactions at all levels and between all stakeholders, thus reducing waste, re-work, and errors while improving overall performance."
After attending the classes, healthcare professionals will:
- Understand the Baldrige Healthcare criteria as a roadmap toward performance excellence;
- Discover how to use the Baldrige Award criteria and scoring system to assess an institution's strengths and areas for improvement;
- Develop an approach for using feedback for improvement efforts;
- Utilize the learning experience to influence an institution's strategic planning process.
Students will explore the reasons organizations are using the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence and understand how to use the criteria as a benchmark for a high performance organization.
The courses are set for Sept. 22-23 in Phoenix and Nov. 9-10 in Atlanta. More specific information on the place and time is available on the ASQ website.
SOURCE: American Society for Quality