Total Quality Management in Health Care

Implementing TQM in Hospitals

Researchers:

A. Pira, A. Gandolfi, A. Verbeck, Prof. M. Baertschi

Partners:

Two Swiss hospitals and Public Authority 

Financed by:

The project partners

Costs in the health care sector increased significantly throughout the past 25 years, and this trend is expected to continue. More than 50 % of these costs arose in hospitals. In order to control the cost, fundamental changes in the health care sector are taking place. Hospitals that are not able to provide services of high quality to their customers will not survive in the long term. One promising management approach focusing on the customer and the continuous
improvement of the structure, the process, and the outcome is Total Quality Management (TQM). However, since hospitals have not gained much experience in dealing with business issues for many of them the implementation of TQM is a major barrier. Additionally, there is no adequate approach for implementing TQM in hospitals which could be used as a guideline.
The objective of this project was (1) to develop an approach based on the well-established European Quality Award (EQA) model for the implementation of TQM in hospitals and (2) to evaluate it by its application to several hospitals in a pilot project.
The approach consists of a multi-step self-assessment based on the EQA-model. It combines two self-assessment methods, the workshop and the pro forma method. The criteria of the model were specifically interpreted for the hospital application. The data regarding all the criteria of the EQA-model being collected and documented in several workshops built the foundation for the actual evaluation. First, the Total Quality was determined qualitatively by identifying strengths and weaknesses for all the criteria. Based on these results, in a second step a quantitative evaluation was done by determining the points achieved in the EQA-model. The pilot project has shown that the developed self-assessment approach based on the EQA-model is suitable for initiating the application of TQM in
hospitals.
Future research will focus on the modification of the EQA-model's structure as well as the refinement of the implementation method.