Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to review the historical development of quality assessment methods in manufacturing industry and healthcare. It examines the gap between methods across the two sectors, as well as the extent to which industrial techniques have been successfully adopted in...

Purpose – National Health Systems (NHS) experience low trust and lack of public confidence while receiving strong pressure from governments and societies to improve their quality and compete effectively. The purpose of this paper is threefold. First, to investigate how patients perceive...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate if different applications of process orientation exist and how these are characterised. Furthermore, the objective is to investigate how the applications of process orientation relate to the line organization. Design/methodology/approach...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss how a performance measurement system called “the flow model” is designed to measure changes towards lean thinking in health care services. Design/methodology/approach – The paper integrates literature from the health care sector and the...