clinics of yazd: efficient or inefficient?

introduction: establishing improvement in every organization requires assessment of organizational performance, planning and goal-setting to improve the performance. despite remarkable progresses occurred in recent years on designing the frameworks and performance evaluation systems, many organizations still rely on traditional criteria. therefore, according to the importance of performance evaluation, it has been tried to combine qualitative and quantitative approaches in evaluation of total quality management models under the european foundation for quality management (efqm) excellence model and mathematical models of data envelopment analysis (dea); i.e. providing a model regarding performance evaluation for 27 clinics of yazd city so as to evaluate the advantages of the both methods and minimize their disadvantages too. methods: the study population of this descriptive study consisted of all the officials, staff and physicians in clinics of yazd in 2011. 283 subjects participated in the study and 215 of them completed the questionnaire. the data collection tool was a standard 50-item efqm excellence model questionnaire. the validity of this questionnaire has been proved in many previous studies. cronbach’s alpha was also used to determine its reliability (r = 0.89). data analysis was conducted through spss software and deap was also used to determine the organizational efficiency. results: out of the 27 selected clinics, the clinics of akbari (1.09), qaemiyeh (1.054), shahrak-sanati (1.04), azadshahr (1.014), kasnaviyeh (1.06), khatamolanbiya (1.41), fateme-zahra (1.039), mottahari (1.056), paknezhad (1.03), shah-vali (1.016), sepahepasdaran (1.038), dental clinic (1.043), nickpoor (1.11) and kowsar (1.027) were efficient and the rest were inefficient. khatmolanbyah (1.41) and rahmatabad clinics (0.89) obtained the first and the last rating in efficiency, respectively. in other words, more than half of the clinics in the city (52%) were efficient. conclusion: through combination of data envelopment analysis and organizational excellence models, which can constitute a strong performance assessment together, managers of the clinics can make a step toward realistic assessment of the clinics and therefore improve them. furthermore, inefficient clinics can also change the human and financial resources in order to reach an acceptable level of performance.