QUALITY HEALTHCARE SERVICE with Kola Owolabi
The art of copying was perfected by the Japanese. They did it so well and they are already outshining the people they copied from.
Can one copy quality healthcare service like that and even outshine or be better than the people with the original thing?
The Japanese did it and the Chinese are also doing it and I think we should do the same in Africa, most especially Nigeria.
The Japanese, mainly through Toyota perfected the art. Toyota sent her engineers to the United States to study the way American automobiles are made. They came back and in no time, Toyota became the largest selling carmaker in the world. The Chinese followed suit and they have taken over as the manufacturer of the world. Over half of the products consumed worldwide are made in China.
The strategy the Chinese employed was simple. They also sent their young ones to attend university in the United States. At a time, tens of thousands of Chinese students were studying in American universities. They didn’t go there to have a nice time and imbibe the ways of the Americans. They went to learn and master how America makes products with outstanding quality that the whole world was buying from them. By the time the young folks graduated and returned to their country, they gradually started giving expression to what they copied in the United States of America.
The effort took time to produce the intended result. However, they went ahead improving on the quality of their production and today the Chinese can match any quality in terms of production of hard goods from any part of the world. The world has ceded the manufacturing function to them. Even the US that they copied from is not able to compete with China in the area of manufacturing.
Achieving quality is not too much of a tall order. It can be easily done the same way the Japanese and the Chinese did it. It revolves on one word, continuous improvement. That is starting to embark on a journey with the target of achieving the best quality ever in your establishment. The starting point is to align yourself with another organization or establishment you wish to match in terms of what they have achieved in terms of quality.
It is either you come up with a three-level plan on how you will proceed on the quality target attainment. The first level is having a good quality structure in place. The second level is how to improve on the good and get better on a daily basis.
Your plan must incorporate what you need to put in place in terms of quality improvement activities like staff training and reorientation towards achieving the target you have set for yourself. As you are moving forward, you need to solicit feedback from your customers/patients to have an idea of how the steps you took went with them. Finally, you need to up your game by aiming to be the best in your market space. You must aim to be the best or else whatever you do will still be mediocre, if you don’t have a market-best target in your plan.
We continue in the next post on how to use the power of feedback to accelerate on your journey towards becoming better quality-wise in your market space as a healthcare provider.
Kola Owolabi(08023203198) is Fellow of the Institute of Management Consultants (with certifications in Healthcare Organizations Operations and Qualify Improvement in Healthcare Organizations)
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