The quality management jigsaw

The current scene in Australia, as in a large part of the developed world, in relation to the subject of quality management in health care, is characterized by confusion, blurred objectives, patchy involvement and very high opportunity costs. Much of the confusion is caused by a failure to understand or use correctly the bewildering array of terminology that characterizes what is becoming a new discipline in its own right. A series of simple definitions permits the reader to understand what the author is attempting to say. The paper also provides a conceptual framework for the implementation of quality management in hospitals: a jigsaw of activity which hospitals have some difficulty conceptualizing and without which hospitals will never be able to respond seriously to the challenge of assuring quality.