Effective Implementation of a Total Quality Management system
By Mrs. Mary Khoury, Masters Quality and Management Healthcare Organizations, CPHQ, JCI, Quality Consultant / Quality Auditor and Team leader for Hospital Accreditation Ministry of Public Health, Lebanon./ Quality Auditor for Good Storage and Distribution for Pharmaceutical products, Ministry of Public Health, Lebanon / Quality Instructor for Master’s degree at Lebanese University, Lebanon
A leap to improve Business Management especially in healthcare organizations to decrease variability in care, deficiencies and defects in systems, hence to increase efficiency and consistency in care
Effective Implementation of a Total Quality Management system: A leap to improve Business Management especially in healthcare organizations to decrease variability in care, deficiencies and defects in systems, hence to increase efficiency and consistency in care.
Healthcare organizations have complex multiple integrated of interdependent processes and most of them work on only meeting legal requirements thinking that this is enough to their system without understanding that quality defects are problems in the processes and systems, therefore poor quality is costly.
To decrease rework and cost, implementation of documented policies and procedures effectively and according to operations is essential to prevent occurrence of incidents related to patients, employees and visitors. A gap analysis is performed to the organization prior to system development focusing on high-risk processes to improve the actual interlinked processes according to evidence-based practices. Incidents do happen, reporting should be encouraged and investigations are crucial with a blameless culture mentality to improve and prevent their recurrences to improve systems and not punish on an individual level.
Change is one of the main problems that employees face and don’t accept, therefore they underestimate quality because of time and efforts required and detail needs to be addressed but the problem happens when an employee suddenly get absent and errors happen because of variation in care increasing rework and the main cause is that operations are not standardized and staffs are not well trained.
Quality is responsibility of everybody. Individuals need to stop doing what they’ve always done and to start to be involved regularly doing something new and different to establish that change, and then set a new way of working and appreciate quality as a new normal pattern and trend for continuous improvement.
As a consequence, Management involvement is critical to “buy in”, encourage and empower staffs to be noted that their decisions should be made in an objective manner according to measurable, accurate and reliable data to create a resilient system.
