ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to define quality assurance and its associated terms. It reviews existing quality assurance management systems and frameworks. The chapter examines the origins of, and the responses to, quality assurance demands. It also aims to develop a constructively critical view of quality management, whether partial quality management or total quality management. The aims of assurance management system a quality assurance management system are to prevent non-conformity or customer problems and to achieve customer satisfaction; the objectives are to minimize risk and cost and maximize benefits that can be obtained from achieving the required quality standards. Oystein Ovretveit defines three dimensions of quality which might take the following form: client quality, professional quality, and management quality. This account combines the commercially dominant view of customer satisfaction with acknowledgement of the rights, duties and judgements of professionals and with an acceptance of budget limits and control by government departments, to which public employees must, to a degree, be subject.
