Essam Hamed Amin Ali
Total Quality Management Consultant, UAE
Title: Total Quality Management in healthcare sector
Biography
Biography: Essam Hamed Amin Ali
Abstract
Total Quality Management (TQM) is not a new concept.
In 1931; W.A Shewhart recognized that variability within Industry production could be understood using the principles of probability and statistics (Schultz, 1988).
Variability is the dispersion exhibited by evaluations of successive events resulting from a common process.
During the 1950’s, Joseph J.Juran tackled the cost of achieving quality and discovered it could be divided into avoidable and avoidable cost (Crosby ,1987).W. Edward Deming, in the 1950’s, asked “Who can put a price on a satisfied costumer, and who can figure the cost of dissatisfied one?”(Strickland, 1989).
TQM is just a program but an active corporate strategy to optimize resources and reduce inefficiencies, rework cost and costumer complaints.
TQM seeks to raise the collective vision of quality and change the focus from the product to all the contributing processes that determine the quality of the product (Strickland, 1989).
TQM applies to all facets of clinical and administrative operations .Its implementation within health care is unique; therefore, to fully understand this environment, three fundamental assumptions must be made.
The first is that medicine is a service field, not just technical or industrial.
Second, is the linear process of medicine, all parts must come together at the right time and place for the process to progress.
Third, the limiting steps in each process are either process or resource – driven (Wright-Patterson AFB Study, 1989).
TQM in health care strives to refine systems to meet or exceed goals for achieving quality technical outcomes, maintaining cost effectiveness, and for ensuring the most effective use of resources for providing continuous quality service to all customers