Hospital Universitario Fundación Jiménez Díaz – A Case Study

Since 1955, Hospital Universitario Fundación Jiménez Díaz (HUFJD) has set out to deliver the highest standards of medical care, research, and teaching in Madrid.

The hospital’s ambitions are broad-ranging – to transform the health service, to innovate, and to improve its work across care, teaching and research. In short – to provide better care for patients.

But bold visions tend to prompt difficult organisational questions: How to define success? How to benchmark current performance? How to measure improvement? How to bring all of our stakeholders on our transformational journey?

“The EFQM model has provided us with a framework to refine ongoing efforts to organise and structure our hospital strategy. Supported by the model, organisation-wide measures have changed our culture and the way our staff think, focusing their work on promoting health, not only treating diseases,” says Hospital Manager, Juan Antonio Álvaro de la Parra.

“We have used the EFQM model to reinforce the notion that care delivery focused on clinical processes, patients, team members and society is the most effective caring .”

HUFJD first received EFQM accreditation in 2013 and has been using the model ever since in order to constantly improve its own performance, particularly to promote innovation, flexibility and change abilities.

The hospital has invested significantly in internal communication and training to ensure that its strategic objectives are first understood, and then can be acted upon by all of its 3,500 employees.

The benchmarking and external perspectives that the EFQM model requires has also helped the hospital to identify potential improvements from similar organisations in Spain, and worldwide. Staff are now so aligned with the desire for best practice and HUFJD’s quest for excellence that they return from conferences keener than ever to implement what they’ve learned.

“Our people are on board with the strategy of the management, which gives us confidence in our current path and in the benefits that we will reap in the future,” says Juan Antonio Álvaro de la Parra.

“We are now more patient-centred, and the entire organisation has been aligned under our three strategic axes: health, patient experience and efficiency. Our continuous search for improvements translates into better care for our patients.”