Background, objectives and method: The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA) provides a
set of criteria for organisational quality assessment and improvement that has been used by thousands of
business, healthcare and educational organisations for more than a decade. The criteria can be used as a tool
for self-evaluation, and are widely recognised as a robust framework for design and evaluation of healthcare
systems. The clinical microsystem, as an organisational construct, is a systems approach for providing clinical
care based on theories from organisational development, leadership and improvement. This study compared
the MBNQA criteria for healthcare and the success factors of high-performing clinical microsystems to (1)
determine whether microsystem success characteristics cover the same range of issues addressed by the
Baldrige criteria and (2) examine whether this comparison might better inform our understanding of either
framework.
Results and conclusions: Both Baldrige criteria and microsystem success characteristics cover a wide range of
areas crucial to high performance. Those particularly called out by this analysis are organisational
leadership, work systems and service processes from a Baldrige standpoint, and leadership, performance
results, process improvement, and information and information technology from the microsystem success
characteristics view. Although in many cases the relationship between Baldrige criteria and microsystem
success characteristics are obvious, in others the analysis points to ways in which the Baldrige criteria might
be better understood and worked with by a microsystem through the design of work systems and a deep
understanding of processes. Several tools are available for those who wish to engage in self-assessment
based on MBNQA criteria and microsystem characteristics.