Quality systems in health care: a situational approach.

Many views on quality management in professional service firms derived from ideas of industrial quality management. It seems that in the area of professional services these ideas are taken over without much criticism. For instance, the ideas on quality control and quality assurance generally are heavily based on the ISO 9000 standards. In The Netherlands the PACE-standards have been deduced from the ISO 9000 standards for application in hospitals. In this paper it has been argued that in many cases a more situational approach will be preferable. A global framework for a quality system in a professional service firm has been presented. This framework has been compared with the restrictions for quality systems in hospitals, following from the PACE-standards.