Quality and non-quality in the health sector
The cost of quality has long been the subject of studies in the industrial sector but only recently has it been investigated in the service sector and little in the health sector. Starting from the hypothesis that quality defects concern and the management and the operations of medical establishments while impacting the quality of medical care and services offered to patients, as well as the economic performance of the establishments, this article proposes to analyze the concept of quality in hospitalsand the factors of non-quality, to offer a taxonomy of quality defects, and to estimate their cost for the organization. The findings and their discussion are based on a survey of six establishments in France and Belgium.
