Service Quality Management
Introduction
The need to provide quality of services to the customers of organizations has become important in almost all sectors of the economy. The realization that quality of the services provided for sale to the customers is the paramount aspects of the organizations’ income and the perceptions of the customers and the public has prompted organizations to embark on processes that ensure there is high quality of the services. Healthcare sector is one area that has been affected by the need to have quality of services, given that the health care services are unique to other services in any society. This is because the services are related to the well being of the human being. With this regard, the roles of ensuring that there is quality of the service provided in the health care setting have increased and become more elaborative as the setting increases their services to the patients. Therefore, there has been an increasing need to have quality managers within the healthcare organizations, whose main role is to initiate, implement and maintain the quality of healthcare services provided to patients in a given area and time. It is therefore arguable that quality managers are some of the most important executives in healthcare organizations given that their role encompasses the general healthcare sectors.
Looking at the management hierarchy in organizations, it is clear that service quality management is a vital stage within the healthcare setting. It is actually a level within the healthcare quality hierarchy, coming just after quality cost management, and after the quality assurance, in the order of management levels. In the contemporary and the typical quality hierarchy, the processes of managing quality of the services provided in the healthcare sector involve the system process-oriented advance to quality objectives. The broad aim of service quality managers in the healthcare system is to ensure that the organization delivers consistent, high quality and affordable or cost-effective healthcare services to the customers. The customers to the healthcare organizations in this case are the patients, and thus, it is important that the patients be taken as the customers to the healthcare industry. The health care sector requires that the service quality manager’s role be defined and established within the organization if the patients are to obtain the best of service quality.
Service Quality Issues
The need to have a defined quality of service in healthcare is an important area of debate among various parties, of which scientists and scholars have been involved in the process of developing a model through which hospitals and other healthcare providers within the society would follow in their day to day work. These discussions have however indicated that quality may not be easy to define, and it is a highly complicated process. This is especially important if one considers the dimensionality and measurement of quality in healthcare service provision to the general public, where the methods used to define or measure the level of quality are not well established and may not apply in some cases. Some scholars have argued that the service quality in healthcare system is highly multidimensional and complex concept. This further indicates that the establishment of service quality in a healthcare organization such as the hospitals is a very crucial issue in both practice and academics. This is mainly because there is dire need to establish very clear measures of quality in order to implement, control, manage and maintain a high quality of the healthcare service made available to the patients in a given hospital. Looking at the contemporary healthcare quality management systems that exist in various healthcare settings, it is important to note that the service quality is fragmented and restricted by the discipline which the players in the system provide. In other words, the players in any healthcare organization are the basic unites that the service quality manager must focus on monitoring and guiding in order to realize the de3sired healthcare service quality need by the patients. In addition, the players are the persons with the greatest roles of ensuring that the health care service is of the quality that will be of benefit to the patient, and in this case the benefit is to ensure that he patient recovers from the disease or the condition.
In this regard, it is important to note that the problems or issues associated or affecting the management of quality of service in healthcare system are oriented towards the internal part of the organizations. In the contemporary world, service quality are evidence in a wider variation within the usability of the healthcare services provided to the patients, and these include the overuse and/or underuse of some services and the misuse of others in the system. The main aim of the service quality managers is to ensure that the healthcare service availed by the organization not only satisfies the patient, but also ensures that the patient has been freed of the problem affecting them. Some of the issues affecting the quality of the services provided by the healthcare system include;
Variation in services: variations have been present throughout the health care systems, based on the practice, and which include regional and narrow-area variations. In most countries, these variations are very obvious as one move from one hospital or any other healthcare setting to another, and it forms an indication that the healthcare practices in use today have not kept pace with the evolving health science and technology involving healthcare to ensure that there is evidence-based practices within the nations or the regions affected.
Underuse of servicers is another issue that affects healthcare care service quality. In many countries in the world today, millions and millions of people do not receive the optimum health care that they should get if they are to deal with their health problems. These persons will therefore suffer complications which just increase the cost but consequently reduce the productivity of the services given to the patient.
Overuse of the services has been shown to be another issue affecting the quality management of the healthcare services provided to the people all over the world. It has been shown that each year, the largest number of people in the world receive healthcare services that are unnecessary, and which increase the cost and reduce the effect of the service. In addition, they are sometimes a danger to the patients or even deteriorate the condition of the disease or ailment with the patient rather than treating the patients. For instance, it is evidence that most people in the world receive antibiotics for managing conditions, some of which are not even caused by the microbes rather they may be caused by other factors. In this case, the patient are force d to pay for the antibiotic drugs which do not heal their conditions, neither do they have any other positive effect, but hare just as costly.
Misuse of service in healthcare settings is major issue that has reduced the productivity of the service while at the same time increase cost. For instance, there are large numbers of cases of people being injured by the services they are being exposed to within the process of providing health care services to them. These have further been shown to add more on the need to have extra services to correct the effect, and in most cases, the persons may be forced to pay for the extra service. In addition, some misuse of the service in healthcare results in death of the patient due to the extremity of the effect impacted on them.
In addition to these issues, disparities in quality are prone to occur within the process of providing healthcare service to the patients. This adds up to other issues to the service quality management in healthcare settings all over the world. This is evident when in some nations; where the problems aforementioned affect some groups of the social system. For instance, it may be based on differences in ethicality, origin or racism. In addition, it may have its basis centered on the social status, where poor persons within the society are discriminated against in the process of healthcare service provision, thus culminating into the occurrence of one or more of the aforementioned issues.
Service Quality Solution
The issues described within the context, and which have been shown to affect the quality of the service provided to the patients in the healthcare system can be solved in one of more ways. However, studies have further shown that although the solutions might be theoretically viable, in practice, there may be more than one solution needed to solve a certain issue, while in other cases, they may be totally impractical. Management of the service quality has been shown to be the main factor which could positively affect the solutions to these issues within any given healthcare system. Service quality management requires that the service manger embark on a mission to ensure that all the players within the organization improve the quality of their service at his or her own area of work. In addition, it requires that the service be [provided under the optimum guidelines and conditions so that misuse, overuse and underuse of the service be avoided as much as possible. In this context, the mangers role will be, but not limited to, ensuring the following quality count is observed:
Ensuring that knowledge and ethics of practice are applied; in this case the mangers must ensure that the players in the healthcare setting perform the duties they are expert in. they must ensure that the qualifications and the experience are the major factors that make the players qualify for the occupation that are in within the healthcare organizations. It is the role of the service mangers to ensure that all the services provided to the patients are of the quality as per the prevailing practice, science and technology as well as the guidelines provided within the healthcare setting. For example, they must ensure that the evidence-based medicine is brought to the position of the patients in need of them. This include the development of guidelines that will force the caregivers to ensure that the medicine provide to the patients are the rightful ones, and that they are used in the right doses and at the right way.
The service quality managers have the role of ensuring that the flawless production as well as marketing of the services is achieved. This implies that the service quality managers must determine the best way of providing the services to the patients, and in which case involves the provision of safety guidelines to all the players within the hospital setting. They are obligated to incorporate their knowledge and expertise within the field of making sure that all the players within the organization work according to the given outlines.
Setting of standards is a major factor that helps service quality managers to achieve the goal of ensuring that the patients obtain the best of the service they are looking for. These standards normally are developed together with certain policies, which act as the rules that bind the players onto the prevision of the valid services to the patients. These have been shown to reduce cases of misuse, overuse and underuse of the service. To ensure that this is achieved, quality mangers in the hospital or any other healthcare setting must embark on gathering information through the past records to check if the current standards are up to date and their suitability for the purpose. In relation to the issue of disparities, guidelines must be tailored towards providing the services to all the patients according to their need rather than their physical features. A degree of application of prevailing laws and regulations within the country must be considered when developing the standards and guidelines, where a certain extent of punishment must further be considered.
Private versus public sectors in quality service management
Looking at the private and public healthcare providers within any country, it is evident that there are certain comparisons that one can make as far as the provision of quality services is concerned. These differences occur due to the orientation of the services and the intended outcome of the services given to the patients. Considering the fat that private healthcare providers are there to make some profits while the public sector is a nonprofit making mission, one is able to see the differences from an economic point of view. For instance, the private sectors in healthcare organization must work to ensure that the patients are satisfied by all means, and will thus ensure that the quality of the service provided is very high. In this regards, they are struggling to ensure that their service management is effective, and which will attract more patients to the setting, and thus contributing to profitability.
On their part, public service providers in health care have been defined with some poor quality service management, which often lead to some cases of poor services being given to the patients. Managers in this case do not see the great need to have the service quality, since the organization is not out to make profit, and after all, the public will still fund the sectors, despite the poor results and customer dissatisfaction.
Conclusion
Service quality management is an important aspect of provision of healthcare services in any community. All persons seeking healthcare have a dire need for the best service that will increase their health and thus satisfy their needs. However, in the modern world, there are few healthcare organizations that can fully satisfy the all the medical needs of all the patients. Therefore, there is a dire need for the quality management in the organizations, whose role is to ensure that the patients receive the best of the service as per the prevailing science and technology and the theory of practice. Thus, the role of quality service managers is to try and solve the issues that affect the quality of the service provided to the patients in a given healthcare setting.
