[Quality management between science and competition]

The call for an increase in quality assurance becomes louder and louder. However, it is almost always understood as a more intensive monitoring of quality. The ideas of total quality management described in the ISO norms 9000-9004 gain ground only slowly. By defining quality indicators and developing practical guidelines or appropriate methods of quality management, science could provide the basis. Information processing can make essential contributions such as the profiles of the German perinatal surveys or the Swiss gynecological-obstetrical quality statistics developed by Hochuli et al., but the only way to a widely applied total quality management is quality-assuring activities and quality becoming factors of competition themselves.