note: Working managers may complete this exercise based on the practices of their own organizations. Students may complete this exercise based on the practices of a current or previous employer. Instructions 1. Select and describe the boundaries of the system of interest; the term organization will be used to refer to this selected system. You may select a team, a department, a small organization (e.g., an office practice), or an entire organization. 2. To familiarize yourself with the criteria, review the section called Category and Item Descriptions in the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence available from: www.nist.gov/baldrige/ publications/hc_criteria.cfm 3. The Organizational Assessment Worksheet provides a general description of the criteria category followed by selected questions from the respective 20112012 Health Care Criteria for Performance Excellence category. 4. Based on the system selected in question 1, write a brief reply to the selected questions. Briefly describe your organization, including its services; size; geographic community; key patient or customer groups; and current facilities, equipment, and technology, as well as the number of patients or clients it serves. Briefly describe your organizations key challenges and your organizations current performance improvement system. How do senior leaders deploy your organizations vision and values through your leadership system, to the workforce, to key suppliers and partners, and to patients and stakeholders as appropriate? How do senior leaders encourage frank two-way communication throughout the organization? How does your organization conduct strategic planning? Summarize your organizations action plans, how they are deployed, and key action plan performance measures or indicators. How do you identify patient, stakeholder, and market requirements for service offerings? How do you build and manage relationships with patients and stakeholders to meet their requirements and exceed their expectations at each stage of their relationship with you? What are your key organizational performance measures? How do you use these data and information to support organizational decision making and innovation? How do you assess your workforce capability and capacity needs, including skills, competencies, and staffing levels? How do you address workplace environmental factors to ensure and improve workplace health, safety, and security? How do you design and innovate your work processes to meet all the key requirements? How do you improve your work processes to improve healthcare outcomes, to achieve better performance, to reduce variability, and to improve healthcare services? Provide data for one key measure or indicator of healthcare outcomes that is important to your patients and stakeholders. Provide data for one key measure or indicator of patient or stakeholder satisfaction. Provide data for one key measure or indicator of financial performance. Provide data for one key measure or indicator related to operational performance. Provide data for one key measure related to achieving legal, regulatory, and accreditation requirements. Prioritizing Improvement Opportunities 1. Review the responses to the organizational assessment questions. 2. Note any questions for which you could not provide a response (i.e., the organization does not have a defined process or approach to address the topic of the question). 3. Review the organizational performance results data. 4. Select one or more measures that demonstrate less than desirable results. 5. Select one item from question 2 or 4 as the performance gap for the performance improvement exercise .