The Necessity of Re-conceptualizing the European Foundation for Quality Management's (EFQM) Excellence Model for the Health Care Sector and its use in the Iranian National Productivity and Excellence Award (INPE)

Iranian National Productivity & Excellence Award was launched in 2002 and within the past eight years, top organizations have been recognized by this award system. In the year 2006,some changes were applied and healthcare sector was separated from other segments. Also in the year 2010, the model revised but there was no introduction of any specialized model for healthcare sector.The aim get of this article is to describe the necessity of re-conceptualization of EFQM model for healthcare sector to be applied in National Productivity & Excellence Award. Showing the necessity of re-conceptualizingexcellence model in the healthcare sector, two questions were carried out: “Is there any evidence of using excellence models (especially EFQM model) by the healthcare sector (especially hospitals) for improvement planning?”(In fact, is it demanding by healthcare sector to specialize and re-conceptualize the EFQM model?) And if the answer of this question is yes, “What is done so far now to specialize and re-conceptualize the EFQM model for healthcare sector?” to answer the two mentioned questions, different studies were done in science bases. The gathered sources and materials divided in three groups for more reviews. The findings of studied sources were presented in three following groups: “Proportionate the excellence models for healthcare sectorand using of it”, “Assessment and performance management in base of organizational excellence models in healthcare sector”, and “Statistical examination of the effectiveness of using organizational excellence models and quality models in healthcare sector”. The study shows that there are too many experiences of using excellence models (especially EFQM model) in healthcare sector (especially hospitals) for improvement planning, but there was no experience of specializing and re-conceptualizing the EFQM excellence model for healthcare sector so far. Therefore, specializing and re-conceptualizing the EFQM excellence model is necessary for healthcare sector.