am within one hospital of the three hospital Community Hospitals Indianapolis organization. Quality management was a central feature of this assessment.
This project assessed the training and development of a cross functional chartered quality improvement team within one hospital of the three hospital Community Hospitals Indianapolis organization. As a part of this assessment, literature relevant to the function of quality and specific quality attaining procedures, such as Total Quality Management (TQM) and Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI), and aspects of the implementation of quality goal programs was reviewed. The findings of this literature review are presented in this chapter.
This project was concerned with the pursuit of quality within the organizational environment of a health care institution. The pursuit of quality in the context of TQM in the health care environment, however, is both relatively new and controversial (Atchison, 1992, p. 15). Therefore, most of the literature pertaining to the pursuit of quality deals with organizations operating in other than the health care environment. The literature reviewed in this chapter, thus, concerns primarily the pursuit of quality in fields other than health care. As observers within the health care establishment have noted, however, health care can learn from other fields with respect to the pursuit of quality (Feigenbaum, 1992, p. 56).
Product quality came to the forefront in the American economy in the late 1980s, as the top managements in American companies learned that American product quality was generally perceived by Americans and foreign consumers alike to be inferior to products from other countries particularly Germany and Japan. The initial emphasis in the quality reawakening in the United States was on manufactured goods, as opposed to services, which include the delivery of health care. In the service, professional, and construction sectors, A...