Quality improvement in the healthcare industry: some evidence from Singapore

Presents an exploratory field research on all hospitals in Singapore, highlighting the different routes hospitals have adopted in pursuing their corporate quality journey for the new millennium. In general, both continuous improvement and innovation-based approaches have generated cost and time savings and helped to streamline work processes. However, the initial survey results show that innovation-based programs require a longer time frame for implementation, are more prone to resistance to change and suffer from program failure. Also, large hospitals and public hospitals are more inclined to implement innovation based approaches while medium-sized hospitals tend to use continuous improvement as a medium for quality improvement.