Total Quality Principles

Total Quality Principles

Total quality can be described using three principles, including teamwork, continuous improvement, and customer focus.  The presented articles will describe and examine each principle.  The paper will provide relationship between the stated principle and analyze whether one of the principle can be applied in other principles.

Jablonski (1992), in his articles Evaluating TQM, he considers customer focus as significant in improving quality.  However, identifying this principle seems to be challenging in the field of health care due to the presence of external and internal customers.   The external customers in healthcare providers facilities include technicians, administrators, nurses, and any other professional who uses the organization resources to help the organization meet the need required by the external customers.  The internal customers, according to Jablonski (1992), includes the families of the patients, patients, regulatory agencies, business entities within the society, fiscal intermediaries, and the referring physicians.  The article provides a description of how the customer providers in the health care institution required to understand ways of incorporating the needs of the customers and their expectations to improve customer satisfaction through the use of customer focus.

Focusing on a customer is vital because customers determine the quality of services needed by the patients.  Research indicates that when the customers receive bad or good experience, they tend to inform the rest of the people.  Thus, when the customer gets positive experience, it helps in improving the business, but when the experience is bad, it tends to affect the business negatively, and the patients will not return to the same hospital in future.

Muhammad & Muhammad (2015), in their article, indicated that problem identification is a significant point to be considered in continuous improvement.  The systems of healthcare majorly depend on scientific evidence in improving quality services in the healthcare field.  The authors in this article provided ways of utilizing less resources to do more.  According to Muhammad & Muhammad (2015), they considered this strategy as “lean.”   This principle of continuous improvement can be utilized in healthcare institutions by creating values that can reduce waste.  For instance, making a more effective turnaround time whenever there is a critical test in the laboratory helps not only the customers and patients, but it also helps the physicians.  Lean system, as indicated by Muhammad & Muhammad (2015), describes the seven types of waste, and this includes transportation, defects, over-processing, inventory, waiting, and overpopulation.

Lastly, the article by Vogelsmeier & Scott-Cawiezell (2011) compares how the lead nurses involved teamwork and communication with their team in two different homes.  Evidence showed that higher-performing nursing home depicted few things which were done differently. Preforming home depicted certain characteristics such as, sharing personal understandings and well established communication between the staff members and the lead nurse, improving common goal and teamwork.  Through this, the nursing home performed better as the working environment was conducive due to open communication and collective input from the staff. On the other hand, low performing home limited discussion between staff members burring effective communication.  From these two articles, it is clear that a lead nurse holds a crucial role in facilitating teamwork and effective communication to boost performance in a healthcare facility.  However, not every situation needs teamwork.  There are several ways where a team can offer other more significant opportunities, including learning and growth.   The staff can share a lot concerning the patients’ improvement and the experiences they undergo.

Effective use of these principles promotes success, as indicated by the articles.  They benefit both the practitioners and the researcher in all the environments as proper usage can propel success. The use of customer focus can be utilized to boost continuity and teamwork in order to improve the success of the organization.   Customer focus principle can be applied to improve continuity by showing that focusing on customers makes improvement possible.  For instance, when a patient is welcomed by a happy staff, the strategy of continuous improvement puts the final resort to action as the patient feels satisfied. It is important to note that all these principles improve the strength and success of an organization.