Total Quality Management Implementation in the Healthcare Industry: A Proposed Framework

In recent years, there is an increasing interest in the healthcare industry to apply total quality management (TQM) principles and practices to improve customers’ quality of service and care. The most influencing reason behind this is increased competitive market, advancement of medical technology, high quality healthcare service at reasonable costs, and proactive consumer culture. Therefore, the healthcare managers begin to find new ways to provide services to meet customers’ requirement and TQM best fits to them as this concept had success in other service industries also. This paper highlights some of the current state-of-affairs of TQM implementation in the healthcare industry and presents a TQM implementation framework for them. This framework consists of five different stages or enablers which are integrated systematically to achieve preferred results. The paper concludes that this framework of TQM implementation can lead to a higher business performance of the healthcare industry as well as a higher employee, customer, and personnel satisfaction. Further, managerial implications, pre-requisite for implementing the framework, and scope for future research are also included in the end.