Quality Measurement in Public Sector Organisations

Abstract

Public services have a significant influence both on the life of citizens and on the functioning of the whole economies. It is not possible to talk about the improvement of the quality of the services rendered by the public sector without measuring it. The measurement is the starting point to improve and increase the quality and to continuously improve the organisation activities. There is no ideal assessment method, thus it is worth using several at a time in order to achieve a more or less objective view. If the quality assessment is to be valuable for the organisation, it should result from the inner need to verify the quality of services in order to improve them. It should thus result from the quality consciousness and responsibility for it. The aim of this article is to answer the question whether the public sector organisations measure the quality and if that is the case, how often they measure it and what kind of tools do they use for the measurement. The survey results have been used in the paper. The survey has been conducted among 102 public sector organisations in Poland. The first part of the paper is theoretical and aims at presenting the methods and indicators applied to measure quality and classifying them. The second part presents the survey results concerning the use of these measurements by different kinds of organisations (e.g. state or self-government, public finance sector and organisations of different sizes).