Total quality management application in
Vietnamese healthcare industry
Quality management has been playing a critical point in medical care industry. Total quality
management (TQM) began in Japan in the early 1980s and has moved to the United States,
Europe, and Australia. In the 1990s, TQM became increasingly popular, and many
organizations sought to implement it and utilize it to grow and enhance their operations
(Pourrajab et al., 2012). As reported by the set of hospital quality assessment criteria in the
policies of the Ministry of Health (2013), the hospital’s quality in Vietnam is usually a hot
topic of discussion. Children’s Hospital 1 is one of the first hospitals to pay attention to
improve quality progress. After studying experiences from other countries and considering
quality improvement models, the hospital has chosen TQM as a synchronous quality
management model. TQM is an effective system that integrates the efforts of maintaining,
developing and improving the quality in an organization in order to completely satisfy
customers ‘needs in the most economical way. It also can be known as a method of quality
management that requires all parts of a business to strive together for the goal of satisfying
customer needs and ensure the whole organization develops in a sustainable way. Both
scholars and healthcare professionals have struggled to come up with a definition, as well as
methods of evaluation, monitoring, and quality improvement (Idvall et al., 1997). The
definition of quality is conformance to requirements (Crosby, 1979). According to
Donabedian (1966), quality of healthcare is a remarkably difficult notion to define. Ovretveit
(1997) gave explanation of quality in health service as fully addressing the demands of
