A pragmatic approach to educating rural health services on quality management

Despite the popularity of Total Quality Management (TQM) with its use of multidisciplinary process improvement teams, little appears to have been achieved in rural health services using this approach. Reviewing the literature suggests few publications. Even traditional Quality Assurance (QA) activities in many of the smaller rural health services are reasonably undeveloped. Against this backdrop, the Rural Health Education and Research Centre successfully marketed and ran several experiential TQM workshops for rural health workers across NSW, resulting in 60 TQM projects being successfully completed. The purpose of this paper is to present the model we use to enable more rural health workers to participate in and benefit from quality management.