Quality of a service

Standards dealing with the quality of a service have been developed by a number of national and international organizations. The requirements of an analytical laboratory depend on its size, the range of its activities and the type of analysis carried out. There are therefore a number of Standards that should be considered by an analytical laboratory. These Standards will be covered in more detail in Chapter 9. 

QC and quality assurance programs provide a formal means of monitoring the quality of a service (see Chapter 19). The internal QC program is a relatively short-term view and typically compares the current performance with that of the... 

Heterogeneity The quality of a service may vary from service provider to service provider, from consumer to consumer, and from day to day. 

Quality management is both a technical subject and a behavioral subject. It is not a bureaucratic administrative technique. The rise in popularity of ISQ 9000 has created some unhelpful messages such as the document what you do strategy. There has also been a perception in the service industries that ISQ 9000 quality systems only deal with the procedural aspects of a service and not the professional aspects. For instance in a medical practice, the ISQ 9000 quality system is often used only for processing patients... 

The quality of a product or a service is the degree to which a set of inherent characteristics fulfils requirements. 

Quality means all properties and characteristics of a service that make it capable of satisfying a client s expressed or specified needs. 

To keep such business requires a full understanding of the customer s plant. Plus the provision of the highest quality of technical service, but as appropriate to customers needs. 

Since services are for the most part intangible, customers use a psychological standard to evaluate services and service quality. Customers assess their perceptions of a service relative to their expectations for that service. The expectation the consumer holds for the service becomes the standard. These standards may be completely arbitrary, differ among consumers, and change constantly. If someone is told that the wait for a table in a restaurant is 30 minutes and then is seated in 20 minutes, the service experience is likely to be viewed with satisfaction. Conversely, if the same person is told that the wait is 10 minutes and is seated in the same 20 minutes, the service experience is likely to... 

A control process will address four areas service quality, patient/client satisfaction, financial performance, and service growth. Service quality will be assessed by using a brief report card to evaluate the quality of a sample of the written reports of medication reviews. An annual survey of patient/client satisfaction with the service processes and outcomes will allow evaluation of patient satisfaction. The pharmacy s income statement will be developed to monitor the financial performance of the new programs. This will include service revenue, associated costs, and any net profit. Service growth will be tracked by tabulating the number of service clients and the number of service episodes each month. 

Once service delivery has begun, the control process goes into action. A goal is to make the performance monitoring, evaluation, and feedback activities routine. Intensive monitoring of the quality of initial service encounters provides important feedback on problems that need to be addressed. 

Management reports can also be used to continuously improve the quality of a pharmaceutical care practice. Quality improvement concepts are used in many service-oriented industries. Management reports are essential to improve pharmaceutical care services by integrating data from groups or populations of patients served to help make practice management decisions. 

Looking at Exhibit 31.2, we see that both water flow (FRl) and temperature (FR2) are influenced by both the angle of the cold valve (DPI) and the angle of the hot valve (DP2). The design is therefore coupled. Taking a service example, both the quality of a new hire (FRl) and the speed of the hiring process (FR2) are influenced by the number of interviewers involved (DPI) and the method of scheduling interviews (DP2). 

Managing for quality is and always has been a critical task of management no matter what the industry. In the pharmaceutical industry today, achieving quality of products, services, and processes is as important as it ever was however, today we need to achieve it with reduced resources. We need to do more with less. We need to be as concerned with the quality system s efficiency as well as its effectiveness. Rising regulatory and customer requirements make this ever more challenging. 

In this article, it was our intent to present a perspective on this topic, providing different tools to approach the quality of pharmaceutical services. These have been placed in a context where the concepts of limited resources, cost-opportunity, and efficacy are implicit. The concept has been abstracted so it can be applied to the public or private sectors, to hospital or ambulatory settings, and to different societies, with different values. 

In a competitive voucher scheme, the bearer of the voucher can usually choose a provider. If the voucher covers the full cost of the services or if the cost charged by all providers is the same, the bearer will usually base the choice on perceptions about which provider offers the highest-quality, most convenient, and most comfortable service. Providers will raise the quality of their services in order to attract voucher-bearing users. 

Thus, a method for assessing and choosing tools and services with respect to their quality was developed [265]. The term quality, or Quality of Service, refers to non-functional properties of a service, for instance cost, performance, or availability. Suitable services must be found by the management layer upon request. It is of further substantial benefit if applications and services, such as simulators or communication tools, can be selected from a set of interchangeable instances. This is very likely to be the case in collaborative distributed scenarios. 

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