Investigating Barriers and Providing an Appropriate Model for Establishing Total Quality Management: A Case Study in Hospitals

Total quality management (TQM) is one of the appropriate tools for structural changes in hospitals and the most important philosophies to increase the effectiveness of a dynamic and purposeful organization in a competitive environment. This study aimed to investigate the barriers to establishing TQM in hospitals.

This descriptive-correlational study examined the barriers to establishment of TQM in Kerman hospitals, 2019-2020. 377 managers and experts, medical, administrative and financial staff of the hospitals were selected by available sampling. The data was collected by barriers to the implementation of TQM questionnaire and analyzed by descriptive and inferential statistics and SPSS software version 20.

Most of the subjects were women (67.3%). The mean of total barriers to implementation of TQM in hospitals was 3.94±1.38. The highest mean was related to cultural barriers and staff (4.42±1.16). There was a significant relationship between cultural barriers and staff, barriers related to infrastructure and managerial barriers with the realization of TQM with more than 99% confidence. The standardized value of the impact of the organizational dimension on the cultural barriers and staff was 0.19, organizational barriers on the barriers related to infrastructure was 0.51, organizational barriers on the managerial barriers was 0.30. These correlations were significant. There was a significant relationship between cultural and staff barriers, infrastructure barriers and managerial barriers.

This study showed that the most barriers to establishment of TQM in Kerman hospitals were cultural barriers and staff. Therefore, hospital managers should try to identify these management barriers and eliminate them.