Bridging the gap. Catholic health care organizations need concrete ways to connect social principles to practice.

Establishing and maintaining institutional identity is a challenge for leaders in Catholic health care. A process known as "progressive articulation" can be used to help leaders assess how well their organizations reflect Catholic social tradition and help them apply this tradition toward specific organizational practices. The particular approach described here is called the "Identity Inquiry and Improvement Process" (31P), and it takes Catholic social principles and translates them into criteria and benchmarks for assessing an organization's interactions with internal and external stakeholders. In other words, 31P seeks to make mission measurable and concrete.