International Journal for Quality in Health Care Advance Access originally published online on September 1, 2006
International Journal for Quality in Health Care 2006 18(5):346-351; doi:10.1093/intqhc/mzl031
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Comparison of health care professionals’ and surveyors’ opinions on problems and obstacles in implementing quality management system in Thailand: a national survey
1 International Health Policy Program (IHPP-Thailand), Quality of Care, Nonthaburi, 2 Faculty of Medicine, Preventive and Social Medicine, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, and 3 National Health Security Office, Nonthaburi, Thailand
Objectives. To explore problems and obstacles of hospitals in Thailand implementing quality management systems according to the hospital accreditation (HA) standards.
Design. Questionnaire survey.
Setting. Thirty-nine hospitals in all 13 regions of Thailand.
Participants. A total of 728 health care professionals and 41 surveyors of the national accreditation program.
Main outcome measures. Health care professionals’ and surveyors’ opinions on problems and obstacles in 24 items representing Thailand HA standards.
Results. The response rates were 94.9 and 73.2% in health care professionals and surveyors, respectively. More than 90% of both groups thought that there had been problems in the items such as ‘quality improvement (QI) activities’ and ‘integration and utilization of information’. The items considered by health care professionals as major obstacles included ‘adequacy of staff’ (34.6%) and ‘integration and utilization of information’ (26.6%), for example. For surveyors, ‘integration and utilization of information’ was ranked highest as presenting a major obstacle (43.9%), followed by ‘discharge and referral process’ (31.7%) and ‘medical recording process’ (29.3%). The rank orders for the 24 items as problems and major obstacles were similar in both groups (Spearman’s rank correlation 0.436, P = 0.033 and 0.583, P = 0.003, respectively). Surveyors had a higher degree of concern and paid more attention to care-related items than health care professionals.
Conclusions. Health care professionals have been facing many problems with multidisciplinary process-related issues of the accreditation standard, whereas surveyors might have had some difficulties in conveying the core QI concepts to them. The findings might be explained by the effects of health care reform on the underlying accreditation principles. One of the strategies to respond to the situation was presented.
Keywords: developing countries, hospital accreditation, hospital care quality, hospital staff, provider perceptions, standards, surveys
Address reprint requests to Krit Pongpirul, International Health Policy Program (IHPP-Thailand), Ministry of Public Health, 3rd Floor Pasadu Building, Tiwanont Road, Muang District, Nonthaburi 11000, Thailand. E-mail: doctorkrit{at}gmail.com, doctorkrit{at}post.harvard.edu
Accepted for publication July 11, 2006.
As in other developed and developing countries, concerns about quality of health care have been increasing in Thailand. These are expressed in both the current Constitution [1] and through recent health care reforms [2]. However, quality improvement (QI) and accreditation are still in their infancy in many developing and transitional countries, including Thailand. To improve the quality of health services, various strategies have been pursued including the hospital accreditation (HA) program, one of the most noticeable and modern mechanisms.
Conceived in 1996 as a research and development project, the HA program was closely modeled after the Canadian Council on Health Services Accreditation (CCHSA). Participating hospitals are required to apply Total Quality Management (TQM) principles, self-assess quality performance, and demonstrate activities in the areas of quality assurance and customer-focused continuous QI (CQI). Hospitals must also show a strong commitment to quality at all levels and implement patient-safety programs [3]. External evaluation is then carried out by a team of certified surveyors recruited by similar approach used in developed countries [4]. The standards used for accreditation comprise 20 chapters divided into six key components—leadership and policy direction, resource management, QI process, professional standards and ethics, patient rights and organizational ethics, and patient care.
However, progress has been slow and interest in accreditation limited. After the implementation of the HA program in 2001, only 35 hospitals were accredited in the first 3 years [5]. By October 2004, only 6.6% of all hospitals in Thailand (86 hospitals) had been accredited. Table 1 briefly summarizes Thailand health care system.
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Literature from developed countries that have implemented HA and other quality assurance initiatives indicates that resistance to improvement initiatives by health care professionals, especially physicians [6], was common [7]. Important reasons included a lack of leadership commitment [8,9], resource deficiency [10], and personal factors [11]. Various hospital-initiated approaches for the implementation of quality systems in the United States [12] might not be entirely suitable for countries with less developed health systems.
The evidence from developing countries is encouraging and may be applicable to developed countries [13]; however, only a few case studies were published. For example, the Zambian experience revealed many administrative and infrastructural problems in implementing national accreditation system [14]. In transitional countries such as Thailand, some small studies and case reports have identified major barriers to the introduction and implementation of quality management system in hospitals. These include infrastructure limitations and, in particular, health care providers’ comprehension of the issues at hand [15,16]. Some hospital staff considered QI activities a burden, particularly when the National Health Security Office’s (NHSO) and Ministry of Public Health’s policies required hospitals to participate in the program without proper prior introduction of QI concepts. In addition, the lack of consistency of hospital surveyors’ ‘subjective’ evaluation has been strongly criticized [15].
Studies at the national level to support hospital QI and accreditation have been recommended but are still lacking [17]. In addition, discussions among health care sector stakeholders demonstrate a keen interest in identifying barriers to the issues. This included the comprehensibility of national standard and the capacity of accreditation system [15]. Our study is the first national survey to analyze the opinions of health care professionals and surveyors about problems and obstacles to using standards in the HA framework in Thailand.
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Methods |
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Study sites and populations
We surveyed two populations from November 2003 to April 2004. The first group consisted of health care professionals in hospital settings. Multistage cluster sampling was done by randomly selecting provinces in 12 regions, whereas Bangkok (the 13th region) was purposively chosen. In each selected province, three hospitals [one provincial, one medium-sized community (30–60 beds), and one private hospital] were randomly selected. Respondents were purposively sampled from outpatient, male and female in-patient, emergency, dentistry, pharmacy, and health promotion departments, operating room, and labor and delivery room in each of the 39 selected hospitals. If there were more than one outpatient department, only two of them were randomly selected. In each department, the unit head and one staff member with at least 3 years experience in the hospital were selected; simple randomization of staff identification number was done by the investigators when there were more than one of them.
The second survey population comprised all 56 nationally registered surveyors [5]. The recruitment and selection process, survey team composition, and some administrative logistics were comparable with the system in other developed countries, especially CCHSA [4]. Although most were part-time surveyors and worked in hospitals, none of them were employed by the surveyed hospitals.
Questionnaires
Separate self-administered questionnaires for health care professionals and surveyors were developed and tested. Both questionnaires consisted of three parts. The first part assessed characteristics of health care professionals (profession, department, work experience, and type of hospital) and surveyors (profession, authority, work status, and survey experience).
Because the HA standards were very detailed [18], the second part of the questionnaire represented an abstracted version of them. To represent the most important standards, major structural and process measures in the six key areas were selected and validated by a panel of three experts in QIs, provision of care in hospitals, and research on quality of care. Twenty-four items (10 structural and 14 process measures) were then selected (Table 2). The question was ‘In each of the following items which represent major issues in the Hospital Accreditation standard, do you think that there is a problem for improving quality of care in the hospital?’ Four-point scale (1. ‘No problem’, 2. ‘There is a problem but not an obstacle’, 3. ‘There is a problem that became a minor obstacle’, and 4. ‘There is a problem with a major obstacle’) was used to assess respondents’ opinions.
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Health care professionals were asked to give opinions based on experiences in their hospital. The questionnaires were explained, delivered, and collected on site, though some uncompleted ones were sent back later by post. Non-respondents were defined as those who did not respond to the follow-up telephone calls 2 weeks after the field visits. Surveyors’ opinions were assessed on the basis of their experiences from consulting and survey visit in hospitals. The questionnaires were distributed and collected in the Surveyor Annual Meeting in April 2004. Respondents in each survey were blinded to the results from the other group.
To help validate the answers, the open-ended questions in the last part asked about comments and suggestions to deal with problems and obstacles. The questionnaire was pretested with 30 staff from a 60-bed community hospital in a province other than the sampled ones. Ambiguous responses will be verified by either interview during the field visit or follow-up telephone call for late respondents.
Data analysis
Descriptive statistics were used to describe respondents’ characteristics. The number of response to choices 2, 3, and 4 in the second part was simply grouped into ‘problem’, whereas choice 4 (problem with a major obstacle) was presented as ‘major obstacle’ (Table 2). Items were then ranked by the scales of problem and major obstacle from highest to lowest. The level of agreement on ranking of problems and major obstacles as seen by health care professionals and surveyors was compared using Spearman’s rank correlation test.
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Results |
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Study samples
Of the 767 questionnaires sent to health care professionals, 728 were returned (response rate 94.9%). A total of 114 physicians, 44 dentists, 52 pharmacists, and 518 nurses were included in the study (Table 3). For surveyors, 41 questionnaires were collected; this number accounted for 73.2% of all registered surveyors in Thailand. Most of them were part-time surveyors, working in accredited hospitals as either clinicians or administrators and had good survey experiences (Table 4). Health care professionals had a higher proportion of nurses than surveyors. Table 2 summarizes the results of both health care professionals’ and surveyors’ responses.
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Health care professionals’ opinions
All items were identified by most health care professionals (range 72.9–94.9%) as problems for hospital QI. Of these, >90% thought that there had been problems in the items ‘QI activities’ (94.9%), ‘integration and utilization of information’ (93.5%), ‘promotion of staff participation’ (92.6%), ‘communication among departments’ (92.3%), ‘clinical practice guideline development’ (91.3%), and ‘efficiency of maintenance system’ (90.2%).
Items considered by health care professionals as major obstacles to hospital QI included ‘adequacy of staff’ (34.6%), ‘integration and utilization of information’ (26.6%), ‘promotion of staff participation’ (24.0%), ‘budget for QI activities’ (21.4%), and ‘multidisciplinary care’ (21.3%).
Surveyors’ opinions
Although the ratings of health care professionals and surveyors regarding problematic items were quite concordant, higher ratings were generally observed in the surveyor group (range 87.80–100%). All surveyors agreed that the items ‘integration and utilization of information’, ‘QI activities’, ‘clinical practice guideline development’, ‘multidisciplinary care’, ‘participation in QI’, and ‘discharge and referral process’ were problems for hospital QI. Of these, ‘integration and utilization of information’ was ranked highest as presenting a major obstacle (43.9%), followed by ‘discharge and referral process’ (31.7%), ‘medical recording process’ (29.3%), ‘adequacy of staff’ (29.3%), and ‘human resource development policies’ (27.5%).
The correlation between health care professionals’ and surveyors’ opinions on the 24 items as problem and as major obstacle was 0.436 (P = 0.033) and 0.583 (P = 0.003), respectively. That is, the rank orders for the 24 items were similar in both groups, although some differences were observed. For example, the items in category 6 (patient care) were ranked higher as being major obstacles by surveyors (range 2–13) when compared with health care professionals (range 5–24). Obvious differences were notable for the items ‘pharmacy system’, ‘discharge and referral system’, and ‘staff competency’ (ranked 23, 15, 24 by health care professionals and 9, 2, 11 by surveyors, respectively, for being major obstacles).
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Discussion |
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We found that health care professionals have been facing many problems with multidisciplinary process-related issues of the standard which should have been solved by the consultation and survey process in well-developed accreditation systems [4]. That is, the underlying philosophy of the accreditation program might not be entirely congruent with the contexts of less developed countries. In Zambia, for example, productivity of accreditation system was low at the national level because of the lack of incentive for hospitals to join [14].
In Thailand, the situation is even more complicated and has been challenged by a wide range of external factors, in particular those related to health care reform. Although quality was emphasized [2], resources required for QI activities were not explicitly considered by the capitation-based budget of the Universal Health Care Coverage Scheme [19]. Hence, hospitals had to improve quality relying on their own limited resources. Because a national survey revealed that 43.8% of governmental hospitals were not ready for QI programs [20], NHSO—as a ‘purchaser’ in the current health system—has granted a special budget to promote holistic QI activities. Because the HA was chosen to accommodate this policy, hospitals have considered it as a mandatory program. Although this partly helped solve the issue of financing the accreditation program, which was problematic in other countries [14,21], the accreditation philosophy becomes affected.
Interestingly, the same phenomenon is likely to happen with the US Joint Commission on Accreditation of Health Care Organizations (JCAHO), the first and largest accreditation program [4]. As being criticized for the ‘collegial’ nature of accreditation process and the inability to explicitly identify poor care patterns, some recommendations were proposed to improve JCAHO oversight by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) [22]. One of them is ‘...making JCAHO a federal contract or by following the Government Accountability Office (GAO)’s suggestion of strengthening CMS’ oversight authority of JCAHO’. Despite different contexts, our study provided some insights into the effects of this recommendation.
Structural issues in the standard did not cause health care professionals as many problems as process-related ones, which were more likely to be major obstacles to hospital QI. Zambian experiences suggested that hospitals are not always able to marshal their staff knowledge and resources necessary to meet the standards [14]. Our findings specified that adequacy of staff and budget for QI are the key issues; this cannot be solved solely by hospital management. Interestingly, a few public community hospitals with limited resources in Thailand have been successful in implementing quality management systems and have been accredited [5]. Hence, further studies of these hospitals might provide insight into specific strategies that may be successful for implementing hospital QI.
We found that surveyors paid more attention to core clinical issues, whereas hospital staff were concerned with more general ones. Although the difference was not significant, our results suggested that surveyors have had some difficulties in conveying the core concepts of QI to health care professionals. Comments from surveyors revealed that, for example, hospital staff often presented service improvement projects to them, whereas some clinical areas of major risks remained unaddressed. In the current mandatory system, hospitals aim at getting a certificate just to satisfy the expected goals. Because most health care professionals could not bring QI concepts into practice at hospital level [23], they might consider QI an additional burden and try to use the easiest way to ‘show off’. Hence, surveyors have been considered as quality auditors rather than external peers [24]. Although our findings might be confounded by professions because health care professionals had a higher proportion of nurses, and nursing was one of the areas most affected by accreditation [25], this reflects the actual proportions between the two groups.
We think that surveyors should be able to apply their professional backgrounds, QI concepts, and counseling skills to give context-specific recommendations to hospitals, whereas health care professionals should focus more on core clinical values as expected by the national standards. However, unlike well-developed accreditation systems [4], ‘adjunct’ mechanisms might help improve hospital quality in Thailand. One example at the national level was the modification of the single accreditation process to a ‘three-step ladder’ graduated approach. Hospitals with an ‘acceptable’ level of clinical risk management are now certified in the first step. Once they implement limited multidisciplinary care as well as a more systematic quality program and major systems, such as infection control or medical record management, they can be promoted to step 2. The final step is awarded to hospitals after they meet full implementation of HA standards.
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This study was a part of ‘The Research Question in Improving Quality of Health Care Project’ funded by the Health Systems Research Institute (HSRI). We also thank all staff at the Institute of Hospital Quality Improvement and Accreditation (IHQIA) for providing a positive learning environment despite hard work as well as Nikolas Matthes and Donald Halstead for comments and suggestions on manuscript preparation.
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