The Quest for Quality in Long-Term Care

Abstract

Developing and ensuring the quality of its products and services has become an imperative task for any organisation’s management. This understanding first developed in industrial settings, rather than in health and social services, where the traditional approach has been to consider quality assurance as an intrinsic part of professional ethics (Evers et al., 1997). With the increasingly market-oriented provision of health and social services, however, different stakeholders have driven forward an agenda towards the development of methods to systematically describe and improve performance of personal services, first in the area of health care and, latterly, in social and long-term care (LTC) organisations (Blonski, 1999). Public purchasers of services started to question what kind of product they were funding (‘value for money’) and how to regulate market access for different types of providers. Providers, in turn, had to verify their performance in a more transparent way to satisfy accreditation guidelines and tender specifications in a progressively competitive environment. Service providers have also viewed quality management as a way to improve organisational effectiveness in the delivery of care. Further imperatives came from inspectorates, which were established to monitor the quality and safety of the care delivery process to assure a basic level of quality. Finally, service users have voiced changing expectations concerning the quality of care.