Quality Function Deployment: Application to Chemotherapy Unit Services

Background: today’s healthcare organizations are challenged by pressures tomeet growing population demands and enhance community health through improvingservice quality. quality function deployment is one of the widely-used customerdrivenapproaches for health services development. in the current study, qualityfunction deployment is used to improve the quality of chemotherapy unit services.methods: first, we identified chemotherapy outpatient unit patients as chemotherapyunit customers. then, the delphi technique and component factor analysis withorthogonal rotation was employed to determine their expectations. thereafter, dataenvelopment analysis was performed to specify user priorities. we determined therelationships between patients’ expectations and service elements through expertgroup consensus using the delphi method and the relationships between serviceelements by pearson correlation. finally, simple and compound priorities of the serviceelements were derived by matrix calculation.results: chemotherapy unit patients had four main expectations: access, suitablehotel services, satisfactory and effective relationships, and clinical services. thechemotherapy unit has six key service elements of equipment, materials, humanresources, physical space, basic facilities, and communication and training. therewere four-level relationships between the patients’ expectations and service elements,with mostly significant correlations between service elements. according to thefindings, the functional group of basic facilities was the most critical factor, followedby materials.conclusion: the findings of the current study can be a general guideline as wellas a scientific, structured framework for chemotherapy unit decision makers in orderto improve chemotherapy unit services.