Content area
Full Text
Introduction
Continuous quality improvement of patients care is recognised as essential for achieving excellence in the healthcare service delivery. In the last 20 years, Six Sigma (6σ ) has received a lot of attention among the several quality management philosophies. Six Sigma is a rigorous, focused and highly effective implementation of proven quality principles and techniques, which aims at virtually error free business performance ([13] Pyzdek, 2003). In the 1980s, Six Sigma was initially implemented in the industrial setting by Motorola; it subsequently attracted much attention among people working in the service sector, including healthcare professionals. In 1998, Kentucky's Commonwealth Health Corporation was the first healthcare organisation which fully embraced the Six Sigma philosophy the US; successively, Six Sigma was implemented within several US organisations ([14] Sehwail and DeYong, 2003). A survey of Six Sigma programs in 56 US healthcare organisations conducted by means of questionnaires is presented by ([2] Feng and Manuel, 2008). Six Sigma improvement programmes and personnel training have also been employed in European healthcare organisations. Some case studies presenting Six Sigma implementation in the nursing department at the Red Cross Hospital of Beverwijk (The Netherlands) are discussed in [20] Van den Heuvel et al. (2004); the annual savings obtained in the same hospital by means of the implementation of quality improvement projects are presented in [19] Van Den Heuvel et al. (2005). A review about the Six Sigma methodology application to healthcare organisations is proposed in [17] Taner et al. (2007). More recently, [16] Taner and Sezen (2009) have proposed the implementation of the Six Sigma toolbox to study the turnover problem of doctors in medical emergency services and paramedic backup. However, all of these case studies show that a strong financial and organisational effort is needed to carry out a successful Six Sigma project in the healthcare field. This is a barrier to its deployment within organisations with a limited budget capacity or which are already implementing another quality management philosophy like, for example, the ISO 9000 family of standards. The question arises if there are ways to introduce the Six Sigma techniques within budget-conscious healthcare organisation while retaining an effective outcome.
Based on several years of experience about the implementation of Six Sigma programmes, [12] Magnusson et al.