ABSTRACT

Quality management has been a basic tenet of public management reforms in Finland throughout the 1980s and 1990s. This chapter focuses on the third objective of the 'Quality and Community' programme. From the very beginning, the Association of Finnish Local and Regional Authorities, which organised the project, sought to include a range of local authorities from different parts of Finland. The Association of Finnish Local and Regional Authorities quickly responded to the new quality agenda and developed the 'Quality and the Community' programme. The purpose of the evaluation was to check the current state of the project and the quality improvement achieved by the pilots. The questionnaire focused on the following issues: management and functioning of the quality system; monitoring of public service quality; internal and external quality audits; human resource development; customer satisfaction; and process development. Some public services, such as social services, require 'looser' standardisation for the quality system to function properly.