Quality Assurance Administration

Quality Assurance in Hospitals, Second Edition provides state-of-the-art information on quality assurance management, monitoring, and cost.

The management of quality and sustainability in higher education institutions ensures that proper standards are maintained. Such enforced standardization allows for the highest caliber of training opportunities for various fields and disciplines. The Handbook of Research on Quality Assurance and Value Management in Higher Education is an authoritative reference source for the latest scholarly research on quality management and assurance programs and standards in college-level environments. Highlighting global perspectives on academic and professional learning, this book is ideally designed for researchers, policy makers, practitioners, and professionals actively involved in the field of higher education.

Avedis Donabedian's name is synonymous with quality of medical care. He unraveled the mystery behind the concept by defining it in clear operational terms and provided detailed blueprints for both its measurement(known as quality assessment) and its improvement(known as quality assurance). Many before him claimed that quality couldn't be defined in concrete objective terms. He demonstrated that quality is an attribte of a system which he called structure, a set of organized activities whihc he called process, and an outcome which results from both. In this book Donabedian tells the full story of quality assessment and assurance in simple, clear terms. He defines the meaning of quality, explicates its components, and provides clear and systematic guides to its assessment and enhancement. His style is lucid, succinct, systematic and yet personal, almost conversational.

There has already been much discussion and critique of the New Public Management, and the impact of auditing and inspection on professional work in schools, hospitals, local government and the police. This study, by a qualitative sociologist, uses interpretive methods to examine this new form of regulation from the inside. Based on interviews with inspectors, quality assurance managers, and auditors, as well as with professionals struggling with red tape, it offers a critical and insightful account of organisational change. The author includes vivid accounts of how quality assurance procedures and systems work in practice, conveying a sense of what is practically involved in the work of counting, measuring and managing quality, and the everyday frustrations of professionals dealing with ever-increasing amounts of paper work and red tape. This book should be essential reading for anyone concerned about the rise of this new bureaucracy and the contemporary state of the professions. It is intended to support courses on quality assurance and the New Public Management in public administration and management. It also provides an accessible introduction for students in socio-legal studies, sociology and social policy about the effects of neo-liberalism on public sector work.