Definition of quality:

Definitions of quality vary according to needs and customs, and these definitions may apply to many services. Accordingly, there are many definitions of quality, as follows: 

 ▪ Quality is judging a specific thing based on specific specifications or conformity with needs and specifications.

 ▪ Quality is doing the right thing in the right way. 

 ▪ Quality health care is the application of medical science and technology in a manner that achieves the maximum benefit for public health without exposure to risks.

Different dimensions of quality:

 ▪ Effectiveness and impact: The more effective the service is, the more it can be described as being of high quality.

 ▪ Efficiency: meeting society’s requirements.

 ▪ Ease of access to the service: ensuring benefit from resources and achieving fair distribution of the service to the community.

 ▪ The relationship between people: whether between workers and each other or between beneficiaries of the service.

 ▪ Continuity: To ensure continued use of the service to reach a high level of quality.

 ▪ Resources: Providing what is necessary to provide care so that it is an integrated service.

 ▪ Professional empowerment of workers to provide the service.

Quality assurance : 

 Quality assurance in the field of health services is the application of standards in a safe and acceptable manner to the community and at an acceptable cost, such that it leads to an impact on the incidence of disease rates, mortality rates, disability, and malnutrition.

Quality assurance principles:

 There are four principles for quality assurance, which are as follows:

1- Focus on customer/beneficiary services: Service planning must depend on the needs and desires of the customer or beneficiary. There are two types of beneficiaries: internal and external:

(a) Internal beneficiaries: They are those individuals within the work who depend on each other to provide the service, for example service providers, supervisors, and the rest of the team members.

 (b) External beneficiary: He is the beneficiary of the service, such as the patient or the community.

 2- Focus on the system or processes (procedures):

 Processes are defined as a successive set of steps or tasks that transform people, methods, and materials into products or services. These operations are implemented within a system, where the system is defined as a group of interconnected operations. Quality problems may result in one process as a result of a deficiency in one or several other processes belonging to the same system, or resulting from a failure to coordinate these interconnected processes. If the processes are incomplete, then the outputs will also be incomplete. Therefore, improving quality requires an understanding of processes and acceptable levels of their variability.

3- Focus on information-based decisions:

 Information in the organization is like blood in the human body, so it must be accurate and timely, which ensures the correctness of decisions. Information is particularly needed in places that suffer from scarcity because of its importance in the following:

(a) Define the problem

 (b) Identify the causes of the problem or the processes in which errors are expected to occur

 (c) Measure the results of the solutions applied and ensure that they work correctly

 4- Focus on participation and the work of quality improvement teams:

 All employees must participate in implementing the correction plans resulting from the application of quality improvement steps, and this has advantages including the following:

(a) Employees have a more accurate sense of the errors that occur in their work and the best way to correct them. (b) Employees prefer to implement changes that they feel involved in making decisions.

 The difference between quality assurance and quality improvement There are three basic differences between quality assurance and quality improvement, as follows:

1- The quality assurance system relies on quality control by reviewing patient files and verifying the implementation of treatment according to sound scientific foundations, then identifying deficiencies or errors and determining methods for correction, while quality improvement focuses on preventing errors before they occur.

2- The quality assurance process leads to accusing those who made a mistake and raising strong sensitivities among employees, while quality improvement focuses on increasing cooperation and participation among employees, which leads to determining the correct path to avoid mistakes.

3- Quality assurance processes are always carried out separately from administrative development, while the proper application of quality assurance achieves the integration of the two processes together, which leads to achieving the desired goals. Quality assurance process: The quality assurance process includes steps that came as a result of numerous experiments and are called the steps of the quality assurance program or elements of quality assurance, and sometimes it is called the quality assurance cycle or quality improvement cycle. Whatever the title, this course includes three groups of activities