Quality Management in Acute Hospitals

A survey on the application of quality management in acute hospitals of selected European countries (part of a Diss.)

Researchers:

Financed by:

ETH

This project is part of the dissertation project "Total Quality Management in Hospitals".

It can be observed that an increasing number of European hospitals is applying the concepts and principles of quality management in order to improve the efficiency while maintaining a high quality of their services. After having completed literature research and having consulted health care management experts the researchers found that there is no recent Europe-wide study on what hospitals have done in terms of quality management in the past and are planning to do in the near future.

The first objective of this study is to identify which specific aspects and principles of quality management are applied to which degree in European acute hospitals. The second objective is to illustrate the different levels of quality management European acute hospitals have achieved. For this purpose a questionnaire has been systematically designed. It contains questions to six essential elements of Total Quality Management (TQM) being leadership and
support, employee involvement and participation, customer orientation, process orientation, partnerships with suppliers, and continuous improvement.

The survey's results show that almost all participating hospitals are dealing with quality management. However, many of them just started recently. In terms of specific quality management concepts and models being applied in the hospitals a huge diversity was observed. The concepts or models most frequently mentioned were Total Quality Management (TQM), the ISO 900x standard, the EFQM-model, and the model of the King's Fund Centre. Institutions being already in an implementation phase mentioned improvements of the consciousness and attitudes of their employees as well as organizational improvements as one of the most important changes in their hospital since the implementation of the quality management system. Furthermore, there is indication that the participating hospitals in Great Britain, the Netherlands, and the Scandinavian countries are on average more advanced regarding the implementation of quality management than those in the German and French speaking parts of Europe. The large number of activities planned in the near future shows that quality management will quickly spread through the participating hospitals.