Context:
I work as Occupational therapist in Privet Hospital in Occupational therapy department. In our department we help people who have conditions that are physically and developmentally, or emotionally disabling improve their ability to perform tasks in their daily living and working environments. We also help them develop, recover, or maintain daily living and work skills through engagement or re-engagement in occupation.
Introduction:
Overtveit (1992), stated that "we often think of a quality service as one which gives us what we want that quality is customer satisfaction" (p.1). Discussions about quality in health services tend to focus on quality as providing customer satisfaction and choice, or on professional standards and clinical audit. They fail to consider the cost and poor quality in organisational processes and operations, or the quality techniques and philosophies which have enabled commercial organisations to develop customer satisfaction and decrease costs at the same time (Ovretveit, 2000).
The notion of quality defines in terms of key feature of service, for instance, social acceptability, relevance to need, equity, accessibility, effectiveness and efficiency (Maxwell, 1984). The quality philosophy in commercial organisation is the idea of customer responsiveness and of giving customers what they need and ask for; therefore, Ishikawa (1985) claimed that the quality of the service to the costumers, needs to include a professional definition of what customers needs, the customers' opinions about how the service meets their needs and the extent to which the service meets their needs.
In health service, however, the customers may not know what they need, or may ask for treatments that are inappropriate. Accordingly, Baggott (2004), indicated that in the UK health service the duty of quality such as quality assurance and quality improvement have be accepted due to the fact that the provision of information within the health service....