Quality Assurance

A variety of market forces and the push to survive in a climate of ever tightening budgets, have led NMHSs to increase their focus on customer satisfaction. One of the major strategic changes that have taken place in recent years is an increased emphasis on quality, specifically quality management. A quality management system is a system to direct and control an organization with regard to quality. Quality management contains all of the overall management function activities that determine quality policy, objectives and responsibilities, complementing them by means of quality planning, quality control, quality assurance and quality improvement within the quality system.

From a PWS perspective the objectives of a quality management system can be seen to include:

• Compliance with legal or statuary requirements;
• Determination of user requirements over and above statuary requirements;
• Assurance that customer expectations are satisfied;
• Aligning with the NMHS mission and vision;
• Assurance that remedial action is taken on under-performing processes;
• Pursuit of continual performance improvement.

Verification