| By Michelle Peña The Veterans Affairs Cooperative Studies Program Clinical Research Pharmacy Coordinating Center (the Center)—a 2009 Baldrige Award recipient—is a federal government organization that supports multicenter clinical trials targeting current health issues for America's veterans. Located in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the Center focuses on the pharmaceutical, safety, and regulatory aspects of designing and implementing clinical trials conducted worldwide by itself and other federal agencies and industries. The Center's highly engaged professional and technical staff members work together to produce customized clinical trial solutions. Its employee engagement ranks above Gallup's 75th percentile in many areas, making the Center a "best practice" organization. Reflecting on the Center's Quality Journey Before the Center won the Baldrige Award in the nonprofit category in 2009, it had been on a "quality journey" for more than 20 years. This journey cultivated higher employee engagement, higher customer engagement, greater ability to develop new and to renew partnerships and collaborations, increased capability to provide new products and services, and increased capability and capacity to support more ongoing multicenter clinical trials (which increased from 26 to 38 over eight years)—all with little increase in staffing. Then-director Mike R. Sather credited the Center's success to the Baldrige Excellence Framework's core values and concepts—with a Western twist: "I've got a friend up in Missoula, Montana, and he sent me a book written by James P. Owen, Cowboy Ethics: What Wall Street Can Learn from the Code of the West. I was rather intrigued with it. And then I found out that Malcolm Baldrige was from Nebraska; he was a cowboy. And putting those things together and looking at the 10 principles of cowboy ethics, I thought, you know, this is really something we ought to implement in our program!"
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