Employees' Commitment for ISO 9000 Implantation in a Philanthropic General Hospital: A Case Study by Multiple Correspondence Analysis

摘要

ISO 9000 accreditation is becoming an Important part of healthcare institutions, allowing for the development of a trustful relationship among institutions, patients, employees and government agencies. However, usually it has been difficult to assess ISO 9000 adoption processes, mainly because of the subjectivity and qualitative nature of the indexes used in it. This difficult may generate doubts among employees and clinical staff about the effectiveness of the process. Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) is a multivariate method with a potential for use in ISO accreditation assessment, since it is able to handle qualitative data. Its basic idea is that the association between categories of variables is graphically suggested by means of their closeness, but clear interpretations are still not straightforward, since more than one graph (besides other statistics), would have to be analyzed by the user. This work shows an example of an assessment of employees' perception after four years of ISO 9000 certification through a questionnaire using MCA and a tolerance region (the associative ellipsoid), which may be thought of as a limit indicating the existence of association between variables, within a reference and constant distance. A leave-one-out validation procedure was also carried out for result assessment. The estimated reference distance was 0.154 indicating stable associations between indifferent and slightly positive categories. No association between professional classes and specific questions could be detected.