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While workplace safety considerations are often given prominence by organizations, health and well-being considerations are more difficult to quantify and tend to be given less attention. With suggestions that employee disengagement is increasing, it is important to provide workplaces that positively influence employee well-being. Engaged employees have an energetic and effective connection with their work and look upon it as challenging rather than stressful.

Topics such as "clinical excellence", "patient safety" and "clinical governance" have been to the fore in recent years to encourage high standards of clinical practice, with organizations devoted to such efforts. Current systems for assessing clinical excellence appear to focus narrowly on a limited number of domains of activity, and there is a need for a more embracing and more translational view that is easier to implement in practice.

High quality services have been shown to be directly linked to increased market share, profits and savings, and generally, service quality is also recognized as a corporate marketing and financial performance driver. Specifically, patients' quality perceptions have been shown to account for 17-27 per cent of variation in a hospital's financial measures such as earnings, net revenue and asset returns.

European countries face similar challenges to North America when it comes to workplace health: rising health care costs, an aging workforce, an increase in unhealthy lifestyles leading to chronic disease, an increase in mental disease and loss in productivity due to absenteeism and presenteeism. As European governments struggle to develop strategies for these problems, so do employers who are placing mounting emphasis on these critical issues.

The same economic, demographic, and social trends affect the Mayo Clinic as affect other health service organizations, but often on a smaller scale. In 2002, recognizing that traditional process improvement methodologies alone were insufficient to meet these challenges, the Mayo Clinic's largest department, the Department of Medicine, initiated the SPARC programme to systematically innovate in the delivery of health services.