Trenschel earns prestigious leadership award
Baldrige Foundation recognizes YRMC’s president/CEO
Dr. Robert J. Trenschel, president and CEO of Yuma Regional Medical Center, earned a prestigious national award honoring outstanding innovation and leadership.
The esteemed Baldrige Foundation recently presented Trenschel with its Award for Leadership Excellence in Healthcare.
Trenschel received one of 11 Leadership Excellence Awards from the Baldrige Foundation.
“I’m humbled and honored to receive this prestigious national award. I accept this on behalf of all of our staff at YRMC, as we are on this incredible journey together. We have collectively ignited a culture of innovation where real solutions, to sometimes old issues, are making a daily and hourly difference for the patients we serve,” Trenschel said.
“This honor truly isn’t mine alone. I accept this award on behalf of the entire YRMC staff for the dedication to excellence shown in all aspects of their work each and every day. Our greatest innovations often come directly from employees at every level who work together to develop new ways to follow our vision of ‘always improving.’ These successes in quality improvement really do reflect the spirit of teamwork and the very best of shared leadership.”
In addition to leaders from top healthcare organizations around the nation, other awards recipients include a U.S. senator and leaders representing industries ranging from higher education to cybersecurity.
“Dr. Trenschel’s visionary leadership has established the empowering conviction that every person in our organization truly can be a leader,” said Woody Martin, board chair for YRMC’s Board of Directors. “By challenging the status quo and working with frontline staff to continuously seek new solutions, his commitment to innovation inspires our healthcare heroes to serve YRMC’s patients and community in greater and greater ways. For Dr. Trenschel’s incredible leadership, we are both grateful and proud.”
The Baldrige Foundation, based in Washington, D.C., works to guide and inspire performance excellence among U.S. businesses and organizations. The Baldrige Performance Excellence Program and its awards were established by the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Improvement Act in 1987, during a marked drop in United States competitiveness in global markets.
The program and award were named for Malcolm Baldrige, who served as U.S. Secretary of Commerce during the Reagan administration.
Congress created the award program to:
• Identify and recognize role-model businesses
• Establish a criterion for evaluating improvement efforts
• Disseminate and share best practices.
“America’s economic strength depends on industry’s ability to improve productivity and quality and to remain on the cutting edge of technology,” said President Ronald Reagan at the time. “And that’s why the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award is so important.”
This award is especially meaningful for YRMC, which uses the Baldrige Excellence Framework as the foundation for the medical center’s approach to continuous performance improvement. An important aspect is the Balanced Scorecard, which helps each department and every employee understand the value they bring to improving overall patient care.
The Baldrige Excellence Framework serves two main purposes: (1) to help organizations assess their improvement efforts, diagnose their overall performance management system, and identify their strengths and opportunities for improvement and (2) to identify Baldrige Award recipients that will serve as role models for other organizations.