Quality’s Impact on Sustainability and the Future
By Matt Phillion
Chartered Quality Institute recently celebrated World Quality Week, which focuses on the quality management profession, concentrating on quality’s role in better sustainability as well as its environmental, social, and governance impact. In a healthcare landscape that is growing ever more complex, quality’s impact on sustainability and how the industry reacts and responds to changing regulations is more important than ever.
David Shan, executive vice president and chief quality officer at BD, observes that quality is critical to an organization’s team members, patients, and more—especially now. “At a very high level, we’re at a defining, critical moment of transformation,” says Shan. “It’s a great time to be part of this industry, with things changing at a speed we’ve never seen before.”
It’s a time that also involves incredible constraints from the outside world, he notes, with inflation and supply chain issues alongside regulatory changes. “Recently, there’s been an even more nationalistic approach to regulations, which are becoming more challenging not just for quality but for the entire industry,” he says.
But this gives quality management professionals a chance to stretch their muscles and evolve alongside those changes.
“We’re striving to inspire quality and putting the patient at the center of everything we do,” Shan says. “We want to inspire trust and confidence not just in our services, but also how we do the things we do. At the highest level, the overarching message in our transformation to me is to connect our work to the purpose of advancing the world of health.”
Quality’s recent evolution
It’s difficult to succinctly encapsulate quality’s current status in healthcare, Shan says, but “in many respects, the foundations and fundamentals are becoming even more critical.” We see this in the supply chain, as additional constraints create challenges.
“Quality really is at the center of our focus in many respects,” he says. “Agility in quality has become paramount. Our ability to change and incorporate regulatory intelligence faster and earlier [allows us] to challenge the way we’ve been doing things in the past and adjust to a new kind of environment.”
Quality can often be perceived as rigid, but that isn’t necessarily the case, Shan says. “As part of our ‘inspire quality’ transformation, we’ve engaged in quality management system redesigns across our entire company to make us more agile, and simplify how we’re doing quality, how we’re executing it, and the way we are ensuring compliance. We must be able to evolve as the regulations evolve.”
Quality and sustainability
Good fundamentals in quality management can help prepare organizations for quality’s role in sustainability, Shan says.
“It’s a dimension that continues to evolve,” he says. “You might start with supplier management and engagement—suppliers are a key element of our sustainability approach and strategy. Elevating that level of relationship and the culture of quality with our key suppliers is increasingly important, but it also aligns very well with our overall quality management strategy.”
Transparency is key to building better sustainability in an organization—and simultaneously building strong compliance. “Transparency is really tied into compliance. We’re geared toward transparency from a sustainability perspective, but it’s also something that has become more important, more critical as we make sure we’re ensuring compliance globally in everything we do,” says Shan.
Sustainability also has a direct impact on the work force in healthcare. “At BD, we have more than 6,000 associates related to the quality function, and there is a clear element in our strategy to ensure we are supporting all those associates as we still manage through these unprecedented times of COVID,” says Shan. “As we move forward, it remains front and center with how we think about the evolution of the role of quality, and the simplification of those roles [from] the perspective of our quality management system redesign.”
For quality professionals, educating themselves on improving sustainability goes back to the fundamentals they already trust, Shan says.
“We get back to those very key principles of how we engage with our partners both internally and externally,” he adds. “Fundamentally, the drive toward a more sustainable future has to be grounded in trust and confidence. We are all contributing to doing the right thing, and we’re all thinking through not just what we’re doing now, but the consequences of those actions.”
The essence of this, Shan says, is to continue to engage. BD has established an internal program for elevating its quality culture, making it a journey rather than a destination.
“We feature associates, and also relatives who have been using BD products as patients, to show the importance of what we do not just in a quality function, but across the company,” says Shan. “If that ecosystem is elevated, we can make the right decisions to drive sustainability and our goals.”
The future of quality and regulatory changes
Regulatory impact on quality is ever-changing, Shan says. “What surprises me most is there’s a bit of an ongoing competition across different countries and regions of the world, elevating or raising the bar,” he says. “I think at times it’s kind of disjointed—it’s more of a nationalistic approach.”
Different regulatory bodies don’t talk to each other, and that becomes a challenge as quality management professionals navigate between them and make sure they’re evolving their labors to keep up with those changes. “We’re evolving our documentation, our quality management systems, we’re demonstrating compliance,” says Shan.
Another challenge impacting quality right now, he notes, is that it’s not good enough to target the minimum requirement for quality.
“We needed to strive for the most advanced quality management system so that we’re always ahead of what’s happening,” says Shan. “That doesn’t mean we’ve anticipated everything, but it puts us in the position to be stronger from a compliance perspective.”
There is a cost to this mindset—literally. “We have to ensure that we are looking ahead and understanding up front so we don’t pursue things that would create challenges to our organizations,” says Shan.
Shan, who has a background in research and development and manufacturing as well as quality, says that leaders in quality management would benefit from a more holistic view of how quality contributes to the organization—from the business perspective and beyond. “We tend to be hyper-focused on our own contributions, but being able to step back and engage across multiple functions is critical to being successful in the future,” he says.
The quality management profession is positioned to shine moving forward, Shan notes. “I think the quality profession is incredibly strong, and they should be used more,” he says. “Problem-solving capabilities that are the essence of quality management and business is all about solving problems. The ability is a fantastic bridge to learn other aspects of the organization and enrich yourself outside of your pure function, contributing to solving problems outside where you would typically work. We’re always trying to push and drive quality, reaching out to help others resolve challenges using our abilities and skills.”
Finally, it’s important to observe the connection between quality and innovation, Shan says. “We’ve seen it and lived it through the COVID crisis. We’ve been engaging with our partners in a hyper-accelerated fashion which I think will shape and form how we innovate in the future. That for me is a key positive learning from this entire COVID experience: It has positioned the quality function as an accelerant to change.”
Matt Phillion is a freelance writer covering healthcare, cybersecurity, and more. He can be reached at matthew.phillion@gmail.com.