Thomas John Rose's activity
In group: Quality Management in Healthcare
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Thomas John Rose posted an update in the group Quality Management in Healthcare 1 month, 1 week ago
There is some confusion in the NHS. A Quality Management System is a system that manages quality. It’s not quality and it’s not QI, it’s a Management System! It’s not a fancy diagram that includes Quality Planning, Quality Control and Quality Improvement – it’s a management system. To manage quality individuals need to manage their day-to-day activities at work. Yes – these are your Work Processes. To manage these work processes EVERYONE needs to understand the processes. The best (only?) way to achieve this is by documenting and publishing WAD processes. You don’t need ‘science’ to tell you that – or do you? Have a look at the new British Standard – co-designed with the WHO – BS ISO 7101:2023. I’ll be talking a lot more about management systems.
There certainly is. For many years people contracted Quality Management System to ‘Quality System’ (likely still do) it should always have been ‘Management System’. Yes, we can try to improve matters by incorporating control of Quality Planning, Quality Control and Quality Improvement processes into the system to make them business as usual, but at the end of the day the system is all about managing the business as usual.
Can’t entirely agree about documenting and publishing all WAD processes, where they are well understood and followed/demonstrated there is arguably no need; but certainly where they are not well understood and followed/demonstrated it is essential.
Thanks Ian. I do agree that some simple, ‘every day’ processes do not need to be documented – thanks for pointing that out.
Also Ian I see this style of mapping and documenting processes as a forerunner to modelling and documenting processes for IT developments. Once the processes have improved and matured IT developers will have a much better understanding if the process with much reduced variation.
The ISO standard we work to in Pathology (ISO 15189:2022) has had a shift of wording from ‘Quality Management System’ to ‘Management System’ so probably a welcome change.
The new standard has been designed to work alongside ISO 15189:2022. It’s the ‘management system’ that is important and it’s that that is often missing or ineffective. Both standards have the same management system elements/clauses. This will be a great help if the new standard is used in healthcare generally. Thanks for you comment.