QUALITY AND SERVICE IMPROVEMENT

Quality and Service Improvement

Quality and Service Improvement

Introduction

The purpose of writing this report is to critically analyse the Quality and Service Improvement Agenda in the context of health care organization. In the United Kingdom, numerous organizations are operating for the benefit of the public, therefore, it was a difficult task to select an organization which comes up to merit of the author to study. However, after a lot of consideration, the author selected the UK Public Health Association. The writer tried to cover all the relevant aspect of the association considering all the developments based on the quality and service improvement agenda and also the impact of the agenda on the health and social care. In the report, the author tried to present a deep insight knowledge of the associations about its legislations, programs and principles on which the association is basically operating.

Discussion

Quality

Before going into the discussion of the report, it is very much crucial for the readers to understand the term 'Quality'. Quality itself is difficult to define, especially in this notion, where everything that has a relationship with certain characteristics - a product or service that determines customer perceptions about a particular product or service. It is often seen through the prism of their own subjective assessment of the concept. Similarly, one could say that the quality is set to a high value of the product, the value of meeting customer expectations. As we know customers' expectations are very high. In today's increasingly competitive producers of various goods and services compete not only in ensuring the quality but also innovative approach set to gain more and more new customers.

Defining quality in health care is not easy, it is related to the specific characteristics of these services, which include social character, separating the customer and payer, forced (disease, health status) receiving services and the difficulty in assessing the effectiveness of realized benefits. In addition, a number of health care outside of the universal characteristics of service activities, such as intangibility, indivisibility, instability, volatility, characterized by: - Uncertainties and risks related to both the time and duration of the injury or disease, as well as the scale and complexity of the disease, the effects of treatment, limitations in later life (such as disability). Highly specialized staff - medical staff are subject to strict laws defining the minimum qualifications and responsibilities.

Freedom of choice of technology services - patient succumbing to treat delegates its decision-making powers to the doctor and limit the sovereignty, the doctor, in turn, has a license to practice, which entitles him to make their own decisions regarding treatment. The complexity of health needs - is the simultaneous delivery of various types and benefits associated with the complexity of both the qualifications of the staff, as well as the complexity of procedures. There is a very large dependence of the effects of treatment on the specific behavior of the customer

In the case of medical services is the lack of specific information, resulting from ...