Evaluating perceptions of emergency room personnel towards performance excellence

Health care organizations must deliver quality service and maintain continuous improvement while providing disease prevention, treatment and rehabilitation, since its service outcomes are associated with human health, quality of life, and community development. Therefore, the emphasis on Total Quality Management in health care organizations is on the rise. The emergency room (ER) is a hospital department which provides uninterrupted care to the patients who need a rapid intervention. By aiming performance excellence, emergency rooms may deliver safe, patient-centered, effective, and efficient care and prevent defects. Besides, evaluating their strengths and weaknesses with self-assessment, emergency rooms may determine how close they are to their goals. Thus, they gain the motivation to be able to close the gap between their actual outcomes and their goals, and then decide on the new actions. In brief, emergency rooms may catch the opportunities for improvement through self-assessment. The aim of this study is to evaluate perceptions of Emergency Room personnel towards performance excellence. The evaluation was performed on the emergency room personnel of research hospitals. A scale was used which had been developed from Malcolm Baldrige Excellence Framework to measure ER personnel's perceptions of Performance Excellence. The scale was proved to be valid and reliable through factor and reliability analyses. Afterwards, data were analyzed using frequency, correlation, and regression analyses. The factor which was identified to have influence on ER's Performance Excellence was determined to be "Workforce Focus". According to the consequences of the study, to attain ER's performance excellence, Emergency Rooms must embrace a workforce-focused management approach.