Quality Management Creating a Culture

Quality Management

Creating a Culture of Quality at Veterans Affairs Hospital in Birmingham, Alabama

Veterans Affairs Hospital is one of the most agile and highly integrated healthcare services providers in the United States. Their approach to defining a culture of quality continues to be instrumental in overcoming fear of change and motivating employees to excel and embrace continual improvement. This analysis provides insights into what the key success factors are of Veterans Affairs Hospital being able to create a culture that embraces change, continual striving for higher quality management, and how their leaders are creating a communications-driven culture capable of staying agile during challenging times.

Lessons Learned from the Veterans Affairs Hospital on Creating a Culture of Quality

For any change management program to be successful leadership must support and endorse it through their activities and change in how they work as well. The single greatest predictor of a change management program designed to modify and improve a corporate culture to concentrate on quality is the endorsement of senior management (Clemson, Lowe, 1993). At the Veterans Affairs Hospital in Birmingham, Alabama the change management programs are anchored in the ongoing activities and complete commitment to them on the part of their senior management staff and key leaders of the hospital. Many management theorists point to organizations over time emulating the behavior of senior management teams who, in unison, support broad change management and quality management initiatives (Angeli, Jones, Sabir, 1998). This is certainly the case with the Veterans Affairs Hospital. Total Quality Management (TQM) initiatives are also most successful when the rank-and-file workers clearly see a significant shift in how senior management completes tasks, makes decisions and chooses to invest time and dollars in favor of quality management programs (Bergvall-Kareborn, Bergquist, Klefsjo, 2009). All of these elements taken together are critically important for quality, not complacency or mere compliance to the minimum set of requirements, to take hold and drive lasting cultural shifts in an organizational entity (Almaraz, 1994).

The second key success factor is structural integration of the change management programs, TQM initiatives, and broader strategic plans and initiatives of the organization. For many healthcare providers, this galvanizing factor is the development of effort patient management programs including patient quality control audit initiatives that measure quality of car using the Six Sigma framework (Clemson, Lowe, 1993). This approach to defining quality management makes it quantitatively clear what the differences are in each dimension of quality, further highlighting areas needing the most improvement.