UNDERSTANDING PATIENT-CENTERED CARE IN THE CONTEXT OF TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT AND CONTINUOUS QUALITY IMPROVEMENT

BACKGROUND: Implementing patient-centered care (PCC) requires a fundamental shift in thinking-from how to best provide a wide variety of independent services to how to effectively combine individual service components into an integrated health care experience that meets patient needs and preferences. DISCUSSION: PCC attempts to improve patient care by organizationally and physically moving selected service functions such as basic laboratory, pharmacy, admitting/discharge, medical records, housekeeping, and material support services to patient care areas, thus effecting an organizational restructuring. PCC creates teams composed of multiskilled or cross-trained individuals capable of providing more of the services directly on the patient care unit. Extensive redesign of the basic work processes as proposed by PCC advocates may result in significant changes in employee job scope, task responsibilities, professional autonomy, and reporting relationships. From the employee's perspective such changes may be neither warranted nor welcomed. Therefore, critical PCC implementation issues include obtaining employee buy-in and establishing appropriate incentive structures to facilitate the desired changes. How does PCC fit in with the popular improvement philosophies of total quality management (TQM) and continuous quality improvement (CQI)? Inherent within TQM and CQI is the belief that it is wiser to maximize efforts to design a product or process to be right the first time and to minimize resources devoted to inspection and repair caused by poor processes. PCC builds upon previous TQM/CQI health care efforts by focusing on ways to reduce the white space handoff problem by examining what, if any, changes in underlying structures and processes may be required. In the PCC hospital, TQM/CQI can function as intended, as a methodology for examining and improving the process of care and patient-care outcomes, regardless of internal departmental or profession-based organizational boundaries. CONCLUSION: For hospitals to remain competitive in today's rapidly changing environment, it is becoming necessary to reevaluate both how they are organized and how their work processes have been designed and controlled. The groundwork already laid by TQM/CQI initiatives will facilitate the more fundamental and long-lasting improvements derived from the redesign of the patient-care unit as prescribed by the goals of PCC.