10:23 a.m., March 28, 2007--The Delaware Alliance for Excellence honored Beebe Medical Center as the recipient of the W.L. (Bill) Gore Award of Excellence at the Delaware Quality Award banquet held Wednesday, March 21, in Clayton Hall on the University of Delaware's Newark campus.

The Delaware Alliance for Excellence is a program of UD's Division of Professional and Continuing Studies. Located in UD's Downtown Center at 8th and King streets in Wilmington, the alliance provides educational programs and support for continuous improvement efforts in the Delaware region and recognizes organizational success and performance through the Delaware Quality Award.

The Delaware Alliance for Excellence is one of 39 state programs that utilize the Baldrige National Quality Program criteria to “help good organizations become great,” John Riabov, executive director of the Delaware Alliance for Excellence, said.

Initiated in 1992, the Delaware Quality Award was named in honor of W.L. (Bill) Gore, who dedicated his professional life to excellence. He advocated freedom, fairness, commitment and sound decision-making in an open and creative environment. He believed that each person within an organization is responsible for the level of quality in products and services offered to its customers and stakeholders.

“The primary reason we are here, is to recognize continuous improvement and organizational excellence and to pursue that path through the Delaware Quality Awards,” Riabov said. “Tonight we recognize five organizations that have achieved success in their quest for excellence.”

The Delaware Quality Awards Program is based on the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award Criteria. It honors companies and organizations that excel in leadership, strategic planning and deployment, customer focus, knowledge management, valuing people, operational processes and results.

In presenting the award to Jeffrey M. Fried, president and CEO of the Beebe Medical Center, Delaware Gov. Ruth Ann Minner said the medical center is a “most esteemed leader” in the state's medical and business community, and was the first hospital in Delaware to win the award.

“Beebe Medical Center is the premier hospital for most of the people of Sussex County and visitors to our recreational areas,” Minner said. “The award honors Beebe's efforts to recognize the needs of the people it serves and the care-providers who serve them.”

Beebe Medical Center also has been involved with the Delaware Quality Awards process for several years, and received progressively higher levels of recognition in 2003, 2004 and 2005, culminating in the Bill Gore Award of Excellence in 2006. The award recognizes Beebe Medical Center's focus on process improvement by analyzing and redesigning processes to make them work correctly every time and to improve quality and safety to patients and staff and reduce costs.

“Our journey began 90 years ago, when two brothers, James Beebe and Richard C. Beebe, decided to found a hospital,” Fried said. “Last year we served 45,000 people in our emergency department, and we take great pride because it is each of these patients that benefits from this award.”

Delaware Quality Award of Merit honors went to Chimes Delaware and Bayhealth Medical Center's Impatient Rehabilitation Center.

Serving people with severe autism, Chimes Delaware began operations in 1994 and provides programs throughout the state for individuals with a broad range of severe and challenging behaviors. Services include residential, day habilitation, vocational training and employment services.

“We have multiple customers and our customers are first and foremost people with disabilities and their families who turn to us each day for services. But our customers also are the businesses we support, and very importantly, the state of Delaware,” Terry Allen Perl, Chimes International CEO and president, said. “Chimes Delaware and its Maryland subsidiaries use the feedback report we receive from the award process as part of our corporate commitment to excellence, and it is reflective of what we do here in Delaware.”

Bayhealth Medical Center is Delaware's second largest health care system. Louisa Phillips, director for operations, orthopedics, and rehabilitation services at Bayhealth, thanked the administrators and people on the team who helped with the internal analysis of Bayhealth systems and processes for comparison with the Baldrige criteria for performance excellence.

“The administrators at Bayhealth wanted to put together something very special, with a special focus on performance,” Phillips said. “We did find some areas where we could improve, so we thank you [Delaware Quality Awards program] when we think of the patients and their families that we serve.”

The Delaware Division of Corporations received a Delaware Quality Commitment Award. Part of the Delaware Department of State, the division processes more than 500,000 corporate and commercial filing and information requests annually and is responsible for handling 22 percent of the state's general revenue fund.

“We recognize that businesses around the state and around the world can choose among 50 divisions of corporations around the United States, so we strive everyday to earn their business,” Secretary of State Harriet Smith Windsor said. “We also thank the Delaware Alliance for Excellence for going all out to maintain Delaware as being the corporate capital of the world.”

The New Castle County Land Use Department also received a Delaware Quality Commitment Award. The department's employees handle services from development of plan reviews to building permits, property inspections and tax assessments. The department's goal is to protect and preserve the quality of life for all New Castle County residents now and in the future.

“This is a group of people whose customers are the most important people that we have. People are affected, and quality is something that we have to be focused on,” Chris Coons, New Castle County chief executive, said. “We hope that this is just the beginning of New Castle County's search for quality.”

Keynote speaker Harry S. Hertz, director of the Baldrige National Quality Program, said that there is a current crisis of leadership and ethics in the United States.

Hertz joined the National Institute of Standards and Technology in 1973. He was named deputy director of the Baldrige National Quality Program in 1992 and became director in 1996. Hertz has lectured widely about the challenges and benefits of using the Baldrige criteria as a means to attain results and organizational excellence.

“The Baldrige program really began in 1987 out of a crisis in the United States, a crisis in quality, largely in our manufactured goods,” Hertz said. “I actually believe we have a similar crisis in ethics and a crisis in leadership in the United States.”

Hertz said that the Baldrige program's 40-question “Are We Making Progress” survey taken by employees and administrators about whether or not organizations used their core values in leadership had declined significantly since 2002.

“You need to think about what your employees think of you as leaders. You need to take the survey and see what you can learn about your organization,” Hertz said. “My organization took about half a day brainstorming about how to identify and remove barriers to progress. Your organization can do the same.”

Article by Jerry Rhodes
Photos by Eric Crossan