Member News Releases

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
March 2, 2005

Sarah Bush Lincoln Health System Awarded Distinguished 2005 Lincoln Silver Award

The Lincoln Foundation for Performance Excellence announces Sarah Bush Lincoln Health System as a recipient of the 2005 Lincoln Silver Award for Progress Towards Excellence for demonstrating sound and notable continuous improvement processes. Sarah Bush Lincoln Health System will be formally honored, along with 13 additional recipients, at a recognition ceremony, hosted by Michael J. Birck, Chairman Tellabs, Inc., held at 5:00 p.m. on December 8, 2005 at Tellabs.

Centrally located in Coles County, Sarah Bush Lincoln Health Center is a 187-bed, not-for-profit, JCAHO-accredited dynamic regional hospital. The Health Center provides a full range of acute care and home health services to more than 357,000 residents of Coles and surrounding 19 counties in East Central and Southern Illinois. Employing more than 1,400 area residents, the Health Center continually promotes a culture of excellence. The Health Center also received a 2005 Governor’s Pollution Prevention Award which recognized the organization’s efforts in recycling and energy conservation. Gary Barnett, Sarah Bush Lincoln Health System President and CEO, said, "A significant portion of Sarah Bush Lincoln's strategy is to achieve a culture of excellence, so we chose to use the Baldrige model as our framework for continued improvement. This model of process improvement is consistent with our philosophy of making decisions based on hard data. We applied for the Silver Award for Progress Towards Excellence to measure or benchmark our organization against others throughout the State. It's encouraging to know that our efforts are on the right track. I'm very proud of our employees and this achievement, and we look at this as a continuous learning process. We learned about our processes and the examiners and will continue to learn by sharing information with other organizations."

About the Lincoln Foundation for Performance Excellence

The Lincoln Foundation for Performance Excellence is a not-for-profit organization backed by both private and public funding. The Lincoln Foundation seeks to help Illinois organizations continuously improve their performance by encouraging, developing and highlighting excellence among all five sectors of the economy: industry, service, healthcare, education, and government. For more information, visit http://www.lincolnaward.org or call 630.637.1595.