Managing Quality in Health and Social Care

Introduction

Managing Quality in Health and Social Care are intangible and it is more difficult to measure it physically as compared to the products. Managing Quality is delivery of superior services to their customers according to their desire and expectations. Managing Quality has become a key to success for the service in Health and Social Care and a motivated human resource played an important role for delivering superior quality services by identifying the needs and wants of their customer and also developed some training for their employee according to customer needs and wants. So that employee will be able to provide quality service to achieve customer satisfaction.

Task1 Quality perspectives in health and social care (LO1: 1.1,1.2)

1. Describe the quality of the service from the point of view of three stakeholders

Fig. 1 Health Issues. Source: http://500more.com/digital-health-innovation/

Table 1 Types of Stakeholders

2. Using a model of quality, outline your key result areas

a home’s care provision and enables the identification of performance gaps and cost/benefit assessments to be made (UKAF, 2010). In this model we have four major aspects to be looked into namely: planning, doing, checking and acting.

3. Analyse the relationship between the quality of the clinic and the principles of care for your client group

In every legislation and contract there are loopholes, organisations are to follow these rules, but there are times when the legislations are complicated to read. This can lead to a misinterpretation to the rules, and the organisation may be breaking these rules without knowing. However there are some organisations that deliberately look for these loopholes and exploit them. By using the loopholes to their advantages they can get away with a number things such as not promoting discriminatory practice. If an organisation chooses to exploit loopholes, then the organisation deserves to be shut down, because using the loopholes only gives the workers an advantage and leaves the patients at a disadvantage.

4. Evaluate the role of the hospital and the department of health in setting of clinic waiting time standards

According to cqc.org (2015) External agencies: These are bodies that regulate quality of care and waiting time standards including:

Task 2 Strategies for achieving quality (LO2: 2.1, 2.2, 2.3)

1. Describe a range of standards you would use for measuring the quality of performance of the clinic

2. Evaluate different approaches that may be used to implement a quality system for the clinic

Fig. 2 Health care. Source: http://www.icareaboutcare.org.uk/petition

3. Analyse the value of established quality systems which might help the clinic improve its quality rating

4. Describe the impact of the quality of the clinic on patients, staff and other stakeholders

Training has direct relationship with the employee’s performance. Basically training is a formal and systematic modification of behavior through learning which occurs as result if education, instruction, development, and planned experience. Because of the practical implications of training, it is important to have training that is effective. Studies have proven that more costly but effective training can save money that is wasted on cheap but inefficient training. Therefore, training has acquired a strategic value for clinic staff, since service quality depends on employee customer care effectiveness. Next, the objective is to meet the customer’s satisfaction and their expectations through best services both the functional and operational. To enhance employees’ skills required for a particular job, train their human resources to utilize their optimal potentials but the outcomes of this training on employees in the form of motivation, job satisfaction and commitment, receive a little attention.

5. Analyse potential barriers to delivery of quality in the clinic scenario.

According to nursingtimes.net (2015) there are some barriers to the delivery of quality clinic services. Let me tell you why these common barriers get in the way to the provision of quality clinic services.

Task 3- Evaluating Systems, policies and procedures ( LO1: 3.1, 3.2, 3.3)

1. Critically evaluate the effectiveness of systems, policies and procedures used in the scenario in achieving quality in the service offered.

2. Analyse the factors that influence the achievement of quality in the clinic

Fig. 3 The key to quality. Source: http://www.westnorfolkccg.nhs.uk/about-us/quality-patient-safety

3. Justify recommendations for action to affect improvements in the quality of the clinic.

Task 4- Methodologies for evaluating service quality (LO4: 4.1, 4.2)

1. Critically discuss the alternative methods for evaluating service quality in relation to the internal and external stakeholder interests.

Nowadays hospitals and clinics need to make themselves different from all the others. The most important part to make them different and special is good service quality that can achieve highest customer satisfaction.

Nurses at hospitals play a large role in both the development and implementation of quality improvement initiatives. UK has invested in training for staff education related to implementation of models of quality improvement. As a result, staff are able to utilize the principles of work flow and the process improvement model to assess current practice and identify non-value added activities. Releasing Time to Care is another initiative, originating in the United Kingdom. This initiative involves a review and time study of how nurses spend their time with the view to remove the activities that could be done by allied health workers and support staff in order to enable nurses to spend more time on patient care. The results for the pilot medical unit showed a measurable rise patient satisfaction scores, improved staff satisfaction and reduced incidents on the unit, and over 1700 additional hours per year for nurses to spend at the patient’s bedside

The clinic should always looking to improve the service delivery system and looks to the customer to help with this. One thing that clients complain about the most is long waits at the front desk to check in. One thing that could be done would be to have a plan that would have extra staff working the desk or at least available to work the desk when it gets busy. When guests come in they are generally tired from some disease, the last thing they want is a long wait to get their doctor. If a client can get in the room it will make a lasting impression.

During a client wait they are sometimes forgotten. The staff usually is only involved when the guest needs something or there is a problem. Management could be more involved in the experience than they generally are, management needs to be seen by the clients as it would show a more personal involvement.

Technology has given the world a vehicle, the Internet. Clinics are always having deals and are improving their environment. The clinic will need to get the word out to their customers. E-mail is a great way to disseminate information to customers, it is cost effective and is environmentally friendly.

Success of the clinic depends upon the employee’s satisfaction by providing them with better working environment, training and development, better compensation packages as compared to market and superior quality services to their competitors. Other than that, satisfied customers are most likely to share their experiences with other peoples. Equally well, dissatisfied customers are more likely to tell another ten people of their unfortunate experience. So, it is important to develop some effective training and development program for employee so that they will be able to achieve customer satisfaction and build loyalty bond between customer and employee.

2. In your opinion, what will be the benefits of consulting service users in an attempt to deliver quality service?

In my opinion all clinics and hospitals must attempt to grow and not become stagnant by using the same ideas and concepts for long periods. This idea is echoed by all members that are the reason the service is the right fit for one’s clinic needs. Thus technology is constantly changing and advancing, but the benefit will be to the clinic who takes advantage of the suggested technology that will advance the clinic goals.

Consulting service will address the problems and issues in the areas of information technology and management of the clinic. In information technology area, the consulting service will focus on technology implementation, installation, and customer problems. The management area will address the issues in improvement, training, and strategy development. It will be faster and not time consuming.

The service will provide the following consulting services to clients: problem solving, analytics and optimization, customer relationship management and strategy and change. Beyond services mentioned, this clinic will offer organizational development, assessment, evaluation, and recommendations for change. This measure of consulting will assess employees and management in current positions to determine whether each are suited for positions within his or her area of work. It will also offer training in each area of service provided, leadership and supervisory development, implement necessary changes within job responsibilities, and restructuring of personnel based from data collected from the evaluation process.

Conclusion:

Employees should more understand customer needs and wants. In the other hand, on-the-job training will be more effective than off-the-job training because employee can learn and test on the spot. For conclusion, clinic should put more attention on training and development program so that achieve higher service quality and customer satisfaction.

Sources:

institute.nhs.uk (2015) [Online] Available from: http://www.institute.nhs.uk/quality_and_service_improvement_tools/quality_and_service_improvement_tools/stakeholder_analysis.html [Accessed: 10 May 2015]

dhsspsni.gov.uk (2015) [Online] Available from: http://www.dhsspsni.gov.uk/spsd-standards-quality-standards [Accessed: 10 May 2015]

cqc.org (2015) [Online] Available from: http://www.cqc.org.uk/ [Accessed: 10 May 2015]

hrsa.gov (2015) [Online] Available from: www.hrsa.gov/publichealth/guidelines/qualityimprove.pptx [Accessed: 10 May 2015]

rcn.org.uk (2015) [Online] Available from: https://www.rcn.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/248872/003535.pdf [Accessed: 10 May 2015]

gov.uk (2015) [Online] Available from: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/216321/dh_125239.pdf [Accessed: 10 May 2015]

nursingtimes.net (2015) [Online] Available from: http://www.nursingtimes.net/barriers-to-managing-and-improving-quality/5042161.article [Accessed: 10 May 2015]

homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk (2015) [Online] Available from: http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/jeanc/DOH-final-report.pdf [Accessed: 10 May 2015]

Mark B. McClellan (2015) [Online] Available from: http://www.brookings.edu/research/testimony/2013/06/26-improving-health-care-quality-mcclellan [Accessed: 10 May 2015]

Hansemark and Albinsson (2004) [Online] Available from: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/09604520410513668 [Accessed: 10 May 2015]