"Total Quality Management for Emergency Services: An Introduction" by Robert W. Austin is the 3rd edition of the textbook. The textbook looks at the management and leadership philosophy of Dr. W. Edwards Deming, and how his principles of Total Quality Management can be put to use in the field of emergency services.

Total Quality Management provides the means for any organization to more efficiently and effectively respond to the current and future needs of the communities they serve. It has at its foundation strong leadership and high quality characteristics. To understand the philosophy of Total Quality Management, the book examines the two areas that comprise the foundation of Total Quality Management; Quality and Leadership.

The single most important improvement of TQM is that it focuses on system problems, not worker problems. This is attributed to Dr. Deming's 85-15 rule, which states that 85% of the problems in any organization are system related, while only 15% is worker related. In TQM, individual systems are observed, and methods are developed to improve the system. This resulted in TQM ideals moving the quality process a significant step forward. In this book, we describe how to move from a 'traditional' managed system to a quality leadership system.

Since the debut of the TQM ideology, it has been used in many fields, from manufacturing to service organizations to government. The value of TQM is being discovered in the United States and across the world, and TQM methods are slowly but steadily replacing traditional Quality Control methods. It is not an easy transition, but this textbook shows how it can be done.

The textbook describes Dr. Deming's "14 Obligations" of leadership and the "Ten Deadly Diseases" that can kill any quality project. It describes how to determine where your agency is in relation to how it views quality, and how the culture of the agency can effect its performance. The textbook also describes the tools used by quality professionals, including data collection, flow charting, cause and effect charts, Pareto charts, scatter charts and histograms. Throughout the book, examples from emergency service agencies are included.

It is said the Albert Einstein defined insanity as, "Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." If your agency is not improving, perhaps it is time to try something different. Total Quality Management for Emergency Services will show you how you can change things.

Download a Copy
The download version of the manual is a zipped file that contains the textbook in two different formats; Adobe Acrobat (pdf) format and Open Document (odt) format. The download is free and the manual is released under the Creative Commons license. Go to our download page to view all the packages that are available, or simply download the manual itself.

Purchase a Copy
We now have available soft cover printed versions of the manual for purchase through The Open ISES Store. The manual is exactly the same as the download version, including size (8.5 x 11). The printed manual will have wire binding, allowing you to easily lay the book flat. To order the softcover version, go to http://www.cafepress.com/openises_store.182881786. All proceeds from sales at the Open ISES Store help to maintain and expand the Open ISES Project.