Case Study on Improvement of Hospital Foodservice by Introduction of FMEA Techniques: Focus on Food Delivery Service Quality and Customer Satisfaction

In this study, we attempted to improve hospital food delivery service quality and customer satisfaction by using FMEA (Failure Mode and Effect Analysis), which is applied to the quality control of products in manufacturing plants. Subjective food delivery service quality improvement was judged based on a 5-point likert scale. Traditional FMEA uses an RPN (Risk priority number) to evaluate the risk level of a component or process. The RPN index was determined by calculating the product of severity, occurrence, and detection indexes. In our results, total RPN value (P<0.01) significantly decreased after FMEA introduction, whereas customer satisfaction (P<0.001) and food delivery service quality (P<0.001) significantly increased. Specifically, foodservice errors (P<0.01) and loss cost (P<0.01) were significantly improved by FMEA introduction. Taken together, we suggest that FMEA reduces critical activities and errors in foodservice delivery caused by simple priority selection.

Application of failure mode and effect analysis in reducing hospital medical errors / 中华医院管理杂志

As the importance of clinical risks management grows hospital management,reducing hospital medical errors for patients safety has become a key quality management process.Failure Mode and effect analysis( FMEA) is a proactive technique for error detection and reduction.In this paper,based on a brief review of it's history of development,described in detail the implementation method and steps of FMEA,mainly introducing the research progress for using FMEA in reducing hospital medical errors.