The Role of Management

If you are a manager of a health program or service, your key responsibility will be to prepare for and implement the quality improvement process. Before and during the quality improvement process, you will need to ensure that there is a supportive environment for this work. To create this kind of environment, you might consider two issues: management style and participatory management activities.

Managers who initiate a quality improvement process must incorporate several basic principles into their management style:

• A firm commitment to and support for quality
• A concern for the satisfaction of staff and users of health services
• A focus on problem solving to improve quality
• Respect for staff and their abilities
• A willingness to collect and use data to determine the nature and size of problems and to improve processes

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You will also need to develop strategies for the organization, continually motivate people to support this process, and market change within the organization.

Developing Strategies: Good management involves long-term or strategic planning. Without a clear idea of the organization's goals, employees don't know where the organization is going, or the best means to achieve the goals. An institution needs to define where it's going (the vision), why it's going there (the mission), and how to get there (the strategies). It will then be easier to use this process to work cohesively towards organizational goals. Tools in this section for helping you develop a coherent strategy for your organization include the affinity technique, force field analysis, SWOT analysis, and strategic analysis.

Marketing Change: Quality improvement is about continued readiness to make changes towards improvement. However, every change of attitude or practice implies advantages and disadvantages. For people to accept a change, the advantages always have to be greater than the disadvantages. To promote the idea of change, you need to market its advantages. Tools in this section that will help you market change include developing a marketing plan, stakeholder analysis, and negotiation techniques.

Motivating People: Motivating people to perform to the best of their capabilities and in the best interests of the organization is a huge task. Important elements in motivating people include leadership, clear organizational and individual goals, rewards based on performance of staff, and participatory supervision. Techniques included in this section that will help you motivate your staff include developing a supervision visit plan, effective meeting management, and techniques for solving conflicts.