Participatory Quality Research Articles

Japanese healthcare quality improvement

Are there lessons for the West from the way Japanese managers and healthcare workers use quality methods in healthcare? This paper describes the Japanese approach to quality in healthcare by drawing on a research visit and published research. It describes the similarities and differences between Japanese and other public healthcare systems and the factors leading to the application of quality methods in Japan. The paper discusses why quality methods have been used less in healthcare than in industry, and the methodology of quality circles. It describes why total quality methods have not been adopted, the approach of “evidence based participatory quality improvement” which is being developed and proposes that western healthcare can learn from the methodical “bottom‐up” introduction of quality methods as a foundation for TQM.

Humphry Repton and the idea of association

Abstract In 1738, an anonymous visitor to Lord Cobham's Stowe in Buckinghamshire responded to his tour with one of the most illuminating of eighteenth-century descriptions of Stowe's magnificent gardens.1 Among the attractions of his text are its richness of detail and apparent immediacy of response. We seem to see through this visitor's eyes in a fur less consciously mediated way than we do, for example, in William Gilpin's painstakingly staged presentation of a decade later. The anonymous visitor appears to have sought out and registered everything that was there to be seen, including projects under construction, such as the Palladian Bridge, and this lends his account an unusually vivid, participatory quality. Indeed, his progress through the garden appears to have been so purposeful that we may even learn from observations he does not make. It is noteworthy, for example, that the scabrous anti-hermitage known as St Augustine's Cave is not mentioned in 1738, though it is defirutely present in a grove n...

Employee involvement programs: Will “win/win” work?

Managers see participatory quality circles as a productivity booster; unions and employee activists view them as a morale and job-satisfaction enhancer. Although productivity and quality improvement are the responsibility of management, employee-involvement approaches — such as quality circles — place much of that burden in the laps of employees. What's in it for employees? The answer to that question will determine whether “win/win” will work.