Sustainable quality services in the healthcare industry

Citation

Lee, P.-M. (2006), "Sustainable quality services in the healthcare industry", The TQM Magazine, Vol. 18 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/tqmm.2006.10618faa.001

Sustainable quality services in the healthcare industry

Healthcare is a topic that is never far away from peoples’ minds, especially those in the fast growing “graying” societies and those past the age of 30. The primary concern for most is the ability to continuously enjoy affordable quality healthcare. Quality healthcare encompasses two major aspects of healthcare: clinical quality and service delivery quality. While clinical quality is always the major priority of customers in the healthcare industry, good service delivery quality is equally important in supporting patient care and contributing to affordability of healthcare.

The reason is that service delivery in the healthcare setting includes ward service, laboratory services, admission and discharge services, support services for patients and visitors, and other ancillary services that keep the healthcare facility in optimum operating condition. Lapse of service delivery in any or a combination of these areas may result in patient or visitor unsatisfaction and sometimes may put patient lives in danger, for instance, by administering wrong medication or wrong dosage of medication, or poor maintenance of instrumentation or laboratory equipment. It is therefore imperative that the healthcare industry pays equal attention to the quality of its service delivery. To ensure all aspects of service delivery perform with no or minimal defects, a system view of the healthcare service delivery, should be the approach taken by healthcare administrators. Such an approach could be termed healthcare system management (HCSM).

The integration of Total Quality Management (TQM) principles within the healthcare system management (HSCM) framework is a key enabler for healthcare excellence. It is critical that healthcare service providers should realize that the long-term sustainability of quality healthcare services requires the adoption of innovative quality management practices, theories and techniques, not only in patient contact areas but in the overall system of healthcare delivery.

Instead of focusing only on customer satisfaction issues and the quality of the service contacts, this special issue presents quality perspectives that range from service impacts, to process improvement approaches, service delivery designs, best practices in healthcare industry, and understanding of quality culture in a healthcare organization context.

In this special issue, the first paper looks at the outcome impact of the healthcare service delivery process from the viewpoint of customer getting deficient service. Paper two advocates a system approach to designing effective service delivery processes that integrates strategic enterprise view with business process view through the use of business flow diagramming. While knowing the outcome impact and adopting a system view for designing service processes are critical, the need to understand process performance and be able to plan for process performance enhancement is also a necessity for total quality management. Another paper in this issue describes the use of a logical framework approach to develop a systematic method to plan for process improvements.

A case study approach was presented in paper four that evaluated a healthcare facility that adopted the framework of a national quality award to effect quality management practices within its organization. While effective methodologies, practices, and systems are important to the sustainability of TQM, an equally critical factor is organizational culture. The penultimate paper looks into the importance of organizational culture in determining the success of TQM. Lastly, the final paper provides a critical examination of the current best practices in the healthcare service delivery system and identifies what are the opportunities and challenges that healthcare industry will face in the coming years.

With this special issue, we hope to highlight the fact that sustaining quality services in the healthcare industry requires a system thinking that provides equal attention to the outcome impact, the critical service delivery processes, as well as the input designs to the service delivery processes.

Pui-Mun LeeSIM University (UNISIM]), Singapore

PohWah Khong, Dhanjoo N. GhistaNanyang Technological University, Singapore