Transferring management technology: healthcare quality improvement education in central and eastern Europe

The newly independent nations of the former Soviet Union continue to restructure and refine their political and economic environments. Competition for scarce of dwindling economic resources within these nations and between the nations of an expanding global community necessitates that they adopt more efficient and effective management methods to provide essential public services. As a result, organizational management concepts developed and used in the West (i.e., in the United States and the countries of the European Union) are eagerly sought for incorporation into new administrative systems. This is an opportune time for healthcare service management educators to develop and present total quality management (TQM) programs, stressing continuous quality improvement (CQI) methods specifically targeted and adapted to the organizational needs of these countries, as they restructure their societies from centrally planned to market-driven economies. In general, educators in healthcare service management, acting as information consultants, can play a pivotal role in guiding strategies for healthcare organizational change and in helping to stabilize transitional organizational processes, by providing guidelines that can improve utilization of healthcare resources and monitoring of healthcare service outcomes. Most of the observations and recommendations presented in this article are derived from the author's experiences in conducting healthcare management improvement projects in Bulgaria in 1993 and in Lithuania since 1991.