• Quality Improvement in Health Care
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.76-91
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• 1998

Background : The purpose of this study was to understand general attitudes of physicians toward hospital quality improvement activities who have been members of QA committee in 32 Korean university hospitals. Methods : A postal survey about opinions of hospital quality improvement activities and desirable policy directions was sent to 328 QA committee member physicians. The questionnaires were composed of 48 items. In total 152 physicians responded to this survey(response rate: 49.3%). This study was carried out from January to February 1996. Results : Most physicians(97.5%) recognized the necessity of hospital QA activities. The most dominant supporting reason for quality activities was to improve clinical outcome. Two thirds of physicians regarded their own hospital activities for quality improvement as inactive. They considered that the obstacles were too little concern(33.6%), unclear objectives(28.9%), lack of human resources(14.3%), and insufficient education and training for quality improvement(10.1%). The most favoring policy among respondents was to give health care providers economic incentives. Provision of education and training for implementing quality improvement was the next to it. Physicians revealed their preferences for professional society, government, health insurance societies, consumer groups, hospital labor unions, and mass media in sequence as sponsoring agencies for hospital accreditation program. Conclusion : These study suggested that the concrete means for motivating physicians and promoting constructive partnership among related parties should be developed in order to activate current hospital quality activities in Korea.

• Korea Journal of Hospital Management
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.10-20
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• 2017

Purposes: This study analyzed activities for improvement of quality of care in nursing units to identify group-level success factors of quality improving efforts. Methodology/Approach: Research subjects were 31 general wards of C university hospital, which has 1,200 beds. Data were collected through survey and focus group interview. The mean value of nurses in a ward was converted to unit-level variable value of the ward. The SPSS 24.0 version was used to analyse the data. The units were classified into two groups, high performing and low performing, by the subjective level of quality improvement performance. Findings: The main findings are as follows: 1. The high performing groups participated more in education related to quality improvement and showed more quality improvement cases in progress than that of their counterpart. 2. The high performing group's nurses show more positive perception and attitude on quality improvement activities, and they have positive assessment on the necessity, effect, satisfaction about the quality improvement activities. 3. Middle managers' ability, attitude, motivation, and effective communication across members of the ward played pivotal roles in boosting the quality improvement activities of wards.

• Journal of the Korea Safety Management & Science
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.145-152
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• 2011

Company's survival in a changing business environment is depend on what kind of strategy will be used for facing this business competition society. For this, many companies continued to apply management techniques to improve the activities in this process has been running productivity-oriented activities to switch away from the quality has become a central activity. In other words, quality improvement activities (quality improvement activity) for the continuing businesses is an important strategic element. In this study, single-PPM (Single-PPM) the company's leading quality improvement activities will be used and browse to accommodate factors that affect a successful quality improvement activities, absolute requirement for companies to learn about the conditions to improve the quality of corporate tries to emphasize the importance of the activity.

• The Journal of Korean Academic Society of Nursing Education
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.133-141
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• 1999

Recently there are increasing concerns on quality improvement activities related to difficult economic situations, more competitive environment, health professional's emphasis on quality, and customer's needs in health care. The purpose of this study was to identify educational needs in the quality improvement for staff nurses. Study setting was an acute care hospital having more than 1000 bed in Seoul, Korea. The subjects were 40 staff nurses who participated in the first Quality Assurance(QA) inservice education. Data were collected by self-administered questionnaire which consisted of four parts : QA knowledge and attitude(ten items, by five Likert scale), contents of QA education(ten items, by setting the priority), evaluation of the program(structure, time allocation, place, educational method), and general characteristics of respondents (age, duration to work for hospitals etc.) The response rate was 85%(34/40), Most had positive perspective and attitude about QI/QA activities, but 9% had negative impression and knowledge about this activities. Also they'd like to know the plan of hospital-level QI/QA activities, QI/QA current practice, general hospital system, the role of QA specialist and so on. Consequently, for building the quality improvement activities that is customer-focused, coordinated, outcome-oriented, resource-efficient, collaborative in Korea, at first the education about philosophy, theory, and implementation process of QI/QA should be conducted, and then that on QI/QA terminology, quality indicators development, the analysis and presentation of quality-related data and so forth be followed.

• Journal of Korean Academy of Dental Administration
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.38-43
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• 2021

Based on data from the Korean Academy for Dental Administration, which has been conducting the Dental Quality Improvement (QI) Contest since 2010, we aimed to provide basic data for the development of dental quality improvement indicators by analyzing the trends of dental quality improvement activities. A total of 54 articles in the dental QI contest from 2015 to 2021 were used to search for frequently used words and to classify the quality of dental care. The criteria for the quality dimension of dental care were first classified into structure, process, and outcome, and secondary classification was performed into patient safety, timeliness, patient-centeredness, equity, efficiency, effectiveness, and accessibility. The frequently used key terms were satisfaction (five times), efficiency (four times), system (three times), and implant (three times). The activities for process evaluation were high at 62.26%, structural evaluation activities at 35.85%, and outcome evaluation activities at 1.89%. According to the components of dental care quality improvement, the activity performed under efficiency was the highest (33.96%), followed by patient-centeredness (18.87%), effectiveness (16.98%), patient safety (15.09%), accessibility (5.66%), timeliness (1.89%), and the equity (1.89%). QI activities in dental hospitals were mainly activities on improvement in structure and process, as well as activities on efficiency, patient-centeredness, effectiveness, and patient safety.

• Journal of Korean Society for Quality Management
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• v.31 no.4
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• pp.176-183
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• 2003

The concept of cost of quality has become important economic measures of quality issues for several decades. Most of the research to date has focused on the problem and solution under static business conditions. However, some researchers have found that prevention cost of COQ is one of the expenses of investment and the payback will be shown by the improvement of product quality. These approaches have considered cost of quality issues based on a time factor. It means that there is a trade­off between prevention/appraisal costs and failure costs. Based on a capital budgeting approach, this research reviews the economics of quality improvement activities and proposes the decision criteria to justify quality improvement activities.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Quality Management Conference
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• 1998.11a
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• pp.463-478
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• 1998

This study aims to improve the activities of Quality Circle of Korea companies. For this purpose we studied the fctors to influence the performances of Quality Circle activities, and based upon this result we suggested the improvement method of Quality circle activities. This study will give one way of activating the Quality Circles of our companies.

• Quality Improvement in Health Care
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• v.6 no.1_2
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• pp.136-149
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• 1999

Background : Although a number of studies are related to QA improvement, there are few studies applied various method of QA tools. This study reviewed the availability of general quality assurance(QA) tools according to ten steps in performing quality improvement activities at emergency room of a tertiary teaching hospital which has more than 1,000 beds. Methods : All patients in emergency room from 15th Oct. 1997 to 5th Sep. 1998 were surveyed. The survey data based on the patient's records of emergency room were evaluated according to length of stay, and we tried to identify problems with management of emergency room. To solve the problems, our team applied general QA tools(brainstorming, flow chart, nominal group technique, benchmarking, cause-and-effect diagram, run chart, control chart) to quality improvement activities and discussed the availability of the tools. Results : After the activities such as changes of staffing, the establishment of local area network and chest pain clinic, application of triage and so on, the percentage of patient who had stayed more than six hours was reduced from 56.0% to 46.8%. The mean number of patients per day in emergency room was increased from 49 to 62. But the reporting time for laboratory test was not changed after these activities. Conclusion : Each QA tool has unique benefit and limitation, but we can implement and evaluate the quality improvement activities more scientifically and systematically by applying these tools to practice according to QA ten steps.

• Journal of Korean Society for Quality Management
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• v.37 no.3
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• pp.1-9
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• 2009

Top Managers are apt to do the decision making on the base of cost-benefit analysis. Therefore the return on quality is indispensable to get the commitment of the top managers on the quality programs. The monetary or tangible effects of the most improvement activities through the suggestion systems and the quality circle activities are computed and reported. In most cases the reported gains are much bigger than the input invested. In spite of the reported high return many top managers are doubtful about the truth of reports because the gains are not translated into the profit on the income statement. This paper discusses about the mechanism of individual improvement activities and analyze the system effect which sum the individual effect and the realization effect on the income statement during that period. This will help the top managers to commit on the quality programs with high confidence.

• Quality Improvement in Health Care
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.68-80
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• 2013

Background: This study investigates improvements in non-value-added nursing activities in clinical work, in order to improve the efficiency and quality of nursing activities. Methods: The study was performed as a quality improvement project at a tertiary general hospital. The nursing activities that needed improvements were categories into admission care, discharge care, supply management, diagnostic work-up related activities, and others. The nursing time and frequency of non-value-added activities were compared across nine nursing units before and after implementation of the quality improvement program. Post-implementation patient and nurse satisfaction were subsequently analyzed. Result: Post-implementation, the time spent on non-value-added nursing activities was reduced and patients and nurses were satisfied with the improvements. Discussion: Reducing non-value-added activities in nursing can increase the work efficiency and ensure time for patient care, thus improving the quality of nursing care. For further study, accurate surveys on nursing activities based on nursing time are required.