Abstract

The drive to improve services and products and to achieve “improvement” in organisations that deliver them is relentless and permeates all walks-of-life. Since the mid-1990s, both in the United States of America (USA) and in the United Kingdom (UK), there has been increasing interest in service improvement within the healthcare sector. Following its introduction, the iterative components of improvement theory (Deming, 1994) have been adapted for use in healthcare. Early improvement frameworks, for example, European Foundation Quality Management (EFQM, 1999) and Process Redesign (Hammer and Champey, 1993), developed from manufacturing which focused upon mechanistic processes more suited to industrial settings. The adaptation of such frameworks lacked evaluation because they excluded the humanistic aspect of change. This highlights the deficiency of “fit-for-purpose” evaluation frameworks that may not fully recognise the human elements of improvement. This research is an attempt to address these deficiencies through the inclusion of a more human relations oriented core component to the practice of service evaluation.