Quality Management Program in Barchester Care Homes

Introduction

Modern healthcare organizations require improved healthcare service and better communication with patients. Healthcare homes in the UK are the main institutions required professional staff and special communication strategies. Barchester Care Homes is one of the residencies proposing different programs and services for elderly. In spite of great changes and quality control, Barchester Care Homes would benefit if total quality management program is introduced. The problem is that quality program does not involve all employees and all services proposed for the elderly patients. It involves the main services such as Nursing care and personal care, but neglect quality standards in assisted living and care for non-residents. Total quality management is one of the populate concepts in modern healthcare which helps organizations to create unique value proposition and improve service quality (Bentham, 2001). Today, value creation is indeed organizational priority and the change process is a part of this process. If superior quality is to be more than a short-lived experience, the effort exerted for improvement must be inexorable. In any modern organization, building a culture of quality through the use of symbols, norms and recognition systems serves as the culmination of effort, the final piece in the working prototype of the quality creating organization.

Quality Management Goals and Objectives

The goals of quality care applied to assisted living and care for non-residents are to improve communication and increase number of traditional services provided to these groups (Williams and Torrens 2001). The objectives are to involve more staff in assisted living and care for non-residents and teach them how to communicate with these groups and supply them with new skills and knowledge. In these services, quality is the main priority which helps staff to meet diverse patients’ needs and desires, and support people in need. The case of Barchester Care Homes shows that patients’ loyalty depends on perception of expected satisfaction from possible alternatives. In order to measure satisfaction and service level, questionnaire design will be used. This tool will help to compare the past experience and achieved quality standards (Bentham, 2001).At the ultimate point of contact, patients forces and corporate forces get together. The example of Barchester Care Homes demonstrates that the decision that links the external environment and his environment with the internal quality requirements. Through service act, patient goals are realized and market opportunity is translated into healthcare goals. For Barchester Care Homes, patient satisfaction is the main criteria for service design and strategic growth. The patient is the driver of service effort. In order to meet these demands, Barchester Care Homes introduced total quality management as the core philosophy of the corporation. He becomes the means of corporate fulfillment. By satisfying patient wants and desires, Barchester Care Homes becomes the means of patient fulfillment (Wadsworth and Stephens, 2002). It is expected that in three years, all staff will be able to work with diverse groups of non-resident patients and have excellent professional skills in assisted living (including personal care, medical services, etc). The case of Barchester Care Homes allows to say that total quality management is crucial as it allows the healthcare organization to meet increased patients’ demands and expectations. In contrast to other healthcare institutions, service delivery demands exceptional quality and effective patient relationships management (Andreasen and Kotler, 2003).

Activities

Time-based frames such as response time and time to market, indices for job change and team management, and indicators of commitment are just a a small number of of the tracking mechanisms that can assist in locating the healthcare organization on its value plan and enable corrective action. In the aspect of value creation and patient satisfaction, direct information shift between patient and organization, healthcare enjoy an edge, because the patient is in the organization. Their needs are, as a result, not remote and to be inferred but right here and given expression to (Beckford, 2002). Again advice could also be instant, resulting in high quality, provided responsiveness, flexibility, and learning ability are incorporated into the organization. Rather, a spirit of quality with the organization and its strategy must be encouraged and created. At assisted living, consciousness, acceptance, and active detection of the organization’s strategy have to be consciously and constantly sophisticated. Furthermore, and equally importantly, a cadre of zealous and imaginative employees driven by the value needs to be established in order for plan to link the organization at all levels to the external environment. IQM will become a tangible, exciting process with patient value as its prime mover, its living core (Kotler et al 2008).

Quality assurance programs will help to control skills level and introduce changes in the quality management programs. Barchester Care Homes has already established strict quality expectations and requirements for its employees. In contrast to service industries, quality in Barchester Care Homes is a duty and responsibility of employees based on humanistic and ethical values. These factors are explained by the unique target audience of the organization: elderly patients. TQM belongs to the concept of philosophy in organizational culture (Berkowitz, 2003). For Barchester Care Homes, quality and clients satisfaction is one of those concepts that are often used and misunderstood. In the sense they just describe the attitudes, customs, and assumptions of employees although it is sometimes used, in the sense of educated or sophisticated. In the healthcare context, on the other hand, it is not rare to find the word culture applied to a wide range of managerial situations, including the type of incentives offered, the nature of control exercised, the point of satisfaction, and, in fact, almost anything that describes the inner workings of Barchester Care Homes (Fulford, 2001). For this organization, quality is a philosophy of work and elations with clients. Quality is limited and focused, thus it is the foundation for this organization’s mission of value. Obviously, not only must important veterans needs be determined, measuring how well these needs are being provided for is also critical. The main aspects are indeed the faces of the coin of patient value. For Barchester Care Homes, weightlessness and less vibration could show contradictory since lowering the level of satisfaction might require a heavier involvement of all employees. In reaching a compromise between the criteria, employees have to remember that the disagreement arises not from design or marketing decisions but from a tension between patient needs. Quality needs are consulted to make a determination of the benefits that could be de-emphasized at the cost of the most important ones. Not only must choices be made between contradictory criteria, resulting inevitably in a less-than-optimal decision, patient needs are rarely static (Johnston, 2003).

Structure, Resources, Processes to Support Program

The case of Barchester Care Home shows that the need for a patient-driven quality is explained a need to attract target audience and retain potential patients (Bassett, 2005). The shifting sands of patient needs do not invalidate a method of TQM; rather they make it all the more practical, provided the need for change and flexibility is understood and built into its accomplishment. Not only does TQM play an helpful role in the definition and translation of value and quality, it can also help in adjusting to shifting value perceptions. It is important note that quality should not become more important than the objective of consume satisfaction. Problems arising from a too narrow focus on quality and flexibility are easily overcome by using quality standards and patient surveys. In judging whether TQM or, for that matter, any patient-to-organization communications are functioning effectively, ask the patient (George and Weimerskirch, 1998).

The resources will involve additional training programs for new nurses and on-job training for nurses working for more than three years. At Barchester Care Homes, patients have divergent, changing, and conflicting quality expectations and needs. Feedback will help Barchester Care Homes reduce performance gaps through redesign, improved response time, user data. Though, it is unlikely that Barchester Care Homes will achieve perfection in the eyes of its patients. Either it damages its reputation by comparison to its competitors or to its own past ability or its achievements engender a rising tide of expectations. Barchester Care Homes is constantly “pulled” by or drawn in the direction of specific patient satisfaction, which is the origin of all efforts at constant improvement. To Barchester Care Homes, results provide not only an indicator of quality but also serve as a stimulus to further effort. Sales, market share, and services are useful criteria of quality achievement when used in conjunction with patient satisfaction. Service improvements without meeting patient value perception, on the other hand, shows that the market success might be short-lived and could be due to aberrations in the industry such as competitors’ errors. The opposite situation (low growth in sales and superior value received) shows an inability or lack of effort to communicate the service’s inherent value capabilities and deliver the best quality (Friedson, 2003).

Engaging Staff and Stakeholders

In Barchester Care Homes, quality and clients satisfaction is driven by prestige of the organization and its moral principles. Value delivered to clients is a top priority for the organization. While, in the long run, the quality-maximizing organization will emerge as the winning whether evaluated by market, financial, technological, human or other issues, organizations cannot and do not live on visions and long-range positions alone. At Barchester Care Homes employees are paid, so clients expect high quality of all services provided to them, administration regulations are to be complied with, and local communities have claims on the resources that may not brook disagreement or even delay (Barry, 2004). Similar to other organizations, Barchester Care Homes see quality as its value mission the humdrum necessities of everyday existence call for a mixture of the long and short terms, of detail and plan, so to speak (Chase and Jacobs, 2003).

Measuring and Monitoring

Measuring will be based on patients satisfaction surveys and direct observations of managers. Certainly, poor understanding of patients’ requirements and needs limits the potential of later stages. A poorly-designed service harshly constrains how much quality can be built into it, just as there is only so much promotion one can do with a poorly-made service. Quality is essential to establishing a culture of quality and to focusing attention on patient satisfaction as a basic organizational value. The purpose underlying all quality efforts, of patient satisfaction enhancement efforts in general, is, at one level, to establish both methods and philosophies of working which lead to improved outputs (quality and value) as well as techniques for keeping track of progress toward these output aims (Bowling, 2000). Monitoring will take place each month and will be based on skills analysis and identification of skills shortage. Employee responsibility for quality and the realization that lapses in quality, in effect, break the ties that bind one activity to the other, are the final aims of a successful quality program. Though patient satisfaction is by no means a notion, grounded as it is in specific needs, resources and actions, there is a sense of order underlying it and a sense of responsibility in its achievement that changes physical assessment (Burrill and Ledolter, 1999).

Evaluation

While the important transition from quality-as-designed to quality-as-delivered is beyond dispute, researchers are not so sure they support the implied conclusions that (a) if quality is to be improved, it is best to focus on the design and, as a result, (b) any achieved in quality during the operations phase is minor and not deserving of all the attention showered on it by writers and managers alike. The objections of thinking are obvious (Ashton and Seymour, 2004). Patient satisfaction lies not only in what is done at each organization and service development stage but equally in how the stages are linked to each other. At another, more important and more permanent stage, quality assurance becomes internalized and not continues as an introduced possibility. In Barchester Care Homes, the TQM requires complex procedures to be followed before a plan can be taped, are all struggling against imposing odds. Their services as conceived may be so harshly flawed that the best of efforts at constructing satisfaction (through quality awareness, thorough testing, and instant service) may fall far short of patients’ expectations.

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