Utilization of quality assurance tools in ensuring high healthcare professionals' performance in a public hospital in Malaysia

This paper was written to give a clear picture about the importance of utilizing quality assurance tools to ensure high healthcare professionals' performance in one of the well-known public hospitals in Malaysia. Improving quality among healthcare professionals has become a unifying theme across any hospitals in Malaysia. The importance of improving performance was seen in growing attention to patient safety and reducing medical errors as well as seen as an attempt to reduce waste and inefficiency in the health sector. The rapid growth in healthcare industry in terms of number of competitors as in private medical centers and facilities has also led leaders to ensure their healthcare professionals have derived their performance to full limits. The objective of this paper was to identify the tools that gave the biggest impact towards healthcare professionals' performance and the outcome after complying with the whole quality assurance practice. Respondents selected were doctors and medical officers in Universiti Malaya Medical Centre (UMMC). The result of this paper showed that the three quality assurance tools identified were really critical to ensure the success of the healthcare professionals' performance. The organization and healthcare professionals must play their roles and support each other in enforcing the quality assurance practices to produce good result in meeting their standards and objectives. The application of quality assurance practices was really necessary for both organization and healthcare professionals in order create competitive advantage and to survive in the healthcare industry.