Effective use of interdisciplinary approaches in healthcare quality: drawing on operations and visual management

Thinkers from the broad field of quality management, such as Edwards Deming, have influenced the more focused field of healthcare quality including international organisations such as the Institute for Healthcare Improvement and The Health Foundation. Quality management was initially established for industrial settings but has since been applied in many other sectors such as education, travel and, in this context, healthcare. Quality management encompasses quality assurance, control and improvement. Healthcare practitioners and researchers have applied aspects of these in examples such Benneyan et al1 who in their much-cited text apply statistical process control in healthcare quality improvement using standard techniques developed in quality management. Other industrial research fields such as change management and organisational culture have also been adopted by the healthcare quality field. The value of learning from these fields was summarised by Davies et al2 who noted that ‘there is a rich literature...
Source: Quality and Safety in Health Care - Category: Health Management Authors: Tags: Editorials Source Type: research