Quality and safety are first cousins – sometimes the Quality Manager is also responsible for safety, in larger organisations a separate Safety Manager will be found. The role of the safety system is to assess risk and consider the severity of potentials issues and develop appropriate response strategies and to bring this to the attention of the Accountable Manager and post holders. The more data that is available to work with, the more effective will be the SMS system.
The Quality System can supplement the data feed into the SMS system but essentially it should be understood that the quality system is performing audits to ensure the organisation remains compliant with regulatory and company requirements, whereas the SMS system is required to proactively identify potential weak points in the organisational system. These differences should be clearly understood by all key individuals.
To bring it all together in an effective TQS, an organisation needs to ensure that there is a robust structure with clearly defined roles and responsibilities from senior management down. It is important to have clear concise and appropriate procedures, which are understood by a trained and competent staff with managed competencies, and a strong quality audit system to bring to the attention of senior management deviations not just from regulatory requirements but from company procedures as well. There needs to be a process to measure organisational deficiencies and inefficiencies and to use the company tools, including the quality system, to gather the necessary data to analyse and understand the problems and to make appropriate changes within the organisation. Finally, we require a connected SMS system which sits along side and complements the Quality System.
Organisations able to bring this together truly benefit from an integrated and effective quality system.
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