Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award Presentation Ceremony
May 21, 2003

Remarks on Accepting the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award
Sr. Mary Jean Ryan, FSM, President/CEO, SSM Health Care

Receiving this award is a great honor and an awesome responsibility. In accepting it, I would like to express my thanks and share a bit of history.

First, I’d like to thank all the people associated with the Baldrige process: the judges, the foundation, the staff, and especially the examiners. Our examiners went out of their way to visit with us and to understand our large and complex system. We will be forever grateful.

Second, I’d like to thank my congregation, the Franciscan Sisters of Mary, who sponsor SSM Health Care. For 131 years, our sisters have been committed to providing the highest quality health care in the many communities where we serve. It is this constant desire for quality that has driven SSM’s quest to deliver health care breathtakingly better than it’s ever been done before.

And third, I want to thank the people of SSM Health Care: the 23,000 employees, 5,000 physicians, and 5,000 volunteers, who work day in and day out to ensure the highest quality of care to our patients.

SSM Health Care’s heritage of healing began in 1872 when five sisters came to this country from Germany to escape religious persecution. They settled in St. Louis, with $5 to their name.

Ironically – given current world events -- the raging epidemic in St. Louis that year was smallpox. With no thought for their own safety, our courageous sisters immediately began to care for smallpox victims. Their devotion to these dangerously ill patients gave my congregation our first name in the United States. We were called the Smallpox Sisters. Fortunately, the name was temporary.
Of course, as the need for health care increased, our sisters opened first one hospital and then others, responding to requests from communities in need. From our earliest days, our sisters provided care regardless of a patient’s ability to pay. Account books from the 1800s identify almost 60 percent of our patients as “ODL,” which stood for “Our Dear Lord’s.” These were patients who could not pay for their care.

And so it is today. Although we no longer use the term “ODL,” I am pleased that in a world where people’s worth is often measured in monetary terms, we see each of our patients as a unique human person of worth who is in need of healing. And in our sisters’ tradition, we continue to view health care as a service to people in need. We still provide care to everyone who comes to our door – regardless of their ability to pay.

As the first health care recipient of the Baldrige Award, SSM Health Care is living proof that health care in the United States is capable of improving, despite many predictions to the contrary. We are proof that health care organizations can push themselves to step out of their comfort zones to achieve exceptional results. And the more organizations that follow our lead and commit to performance excellence, the greater will be our ability to deliver health care breathtakingly better than it's ever been done before. The people of this nation deserve no less.

During the Baldrige site visit, one of our examiners asked an employee – her name is Rosalind Miles -- in one of our Oklahoma City hospitals what I should say at the awards ceremony if we won the Baldrige. Rosalind said, “Tell everyone that great things come from great people.”

It was excellent advice! Great things do indeed come from great people. Being the first health care organization to win the Baldrige is an extraordinary achievement. . . made possible by extraordinary people.

So, on behalf of the people of SSM Health Care and the Franciscan Sisters of Mary, thank you for this honor.

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