Using the EFQM Excellence Model Within Health Care, a Practical Guide to Success

Citation

Persaud, A. (2002), "Using the EFQM Excellence Model Within Health Care, a Practical Guide to Success", International Journal of Health Care Quality Assurance, Vol. 15 No. 4, pp. 182-183. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijhcqa.2002.15.4.182.2

This is an interesting book that takes the EFQM model and applies it to health‐care practice. The layout is easy to follow with the index identifying the chapters and contents therein in detail. Each of the six chapters uses subheadings to highlight significant points. Italics are used for direct quotes from authors and participants in workshops, diagrams are clear and self‐explanatory and all the above points enable the reader with limited time available to scan for relevant information.

Excellence in health care is a challenging concept, as the author points out on page 1, with one of the criticisms levelled at monitoring quality being that its roots are in industry. Readers may recall the outcry from the health professions when Margaret Thatcher brought in Sir Roy Griffiths to review the Health Service in 1983. He came from a retail background but asked some very pertinent questions of practitioners when he asked whether “the NHS was meeting the needs of the patient and the community, and that it can prove so is open to question”. This question is now being answered with the introduction of clinical governance, a framework firmly established in NHS trusts with the chief executives taking statutory responsibility for it. This does not, however, absolve everyone else in the organisation from taking responsibility for working to improve quality, as the government pointed out in 1998 in A First Class Service.

Throughout the book the author, who is a health‐care professional, utilises literature from a variety of authors recognised as experts in their field to support her discussions, as well as real life examples from her work as facilitator and assessor of the model. She is a founder‐member of the EFQM health sector group and an accomplished author on the EFQM model. This is obvious when she talks about RADAR logic on page 12 of the book before introducing it to her audience in detail on page 24!

Senior management within the organisations appear to be driving the bus on the EFQM journey, which is in direct contrast with some authors who purport that quality assurance should be a “bottom‐up” approach. However, Sue Jackson does flag up that the best approach is one where the organisation’s chief executive and everyone in the health‐care team are committed to the excellence journey.

The author highlights some very beneficial points regarding the model and one of them is that EFQM supports continuous quality improvement and not just a one‐off audit. If more time is being spent on paper work than making health‐care improvements for patients and staff, then the model is not being used correctly.

I particularly like the alignment of some of the core principles of the NHS plan with some of the fundamental principles of the EFQM excellence model.

The accounts from practice of successful and unsuccessful implementation of the model were very honest and it was reassuring to see that it is not all plain sailing. However, the reader is encouraged throughout by the author with “it is the direction of the organisation rather than its speed that is important in the journey towards excellence”, and “start simple – there is no need to apply the model in its total form initially”.

Sue Jackson concludes this book with the health warning that striving for excellence in health care is not for the faint‐hearted. Her enthusiasm for the subject is very obvious in this book. I would recommend it to anyone embarking upon the excellence journey as an aide‐mémoire, when the facilitators have gone home.