Quality Control, Assurance, and Management, Research Paper Example

Quality Control – This is essentially a post-event activity that examines both procedures and product in order to ensure that appropriate quality metrics have been achieved. In the event of failures to determine whether appropriate corrective measures were taken in order remedy the quality issues.

Quality Assurance – This is not quality control. This examines the process in a project in order to ensure that the procedures are being conducted in the correct way. This examines standards, processes and procedures. Within Project Management this is examined from three different perspectives: (1) Technical perspective (2) User perspective and (3) Business perspective.

Quality Management – This examines the functions and activities that make up the management of the quality process. This covers such items as the quality plans, quality control and implementation procedures.

It is considered that Quality Management is one of the most important aspects of healthcare management. This is because it examines the holistic and strategic macro level view of the quality management process and this includes the performance measures. This process has a long history of some 250 years in evolution. (Loeb, J.M. 2004). This is not to undermine the importance of both Quality Assurance and Quality Control which are components within an overall co-ordinated Quality Management practice. Healthcare is very concerned with process and procedures throughout the entire organization. Very often these are measured by the examination of Perforemance Management standards, together with associated metrics that determine how the quality criteria has been achieved. The QM process is responsible for ongoing fine tuning of the Quality Plan to ensure compliuance to quality standards.

References

LOEB, J. M. (2004). The current state of performance measurement in health care. International Journal for Quality in Health Care Vol 16(1), 5-19.