Quality circles fell from grace as they were thought to be failing to live up to their promise.
Kaoru Ishikawa, a professor at Tokyo University who died in 1989, is attributed with much of the development of the idea of quality circles.
It was claimed at one time in the 1980s that there were as many as 10m people participating in quality circles in Japanese industry alone.
The success of quality circles has been found to depend crucially on the amount of support they get from senior management, and on the amount of training that the participants are given in the ways and aims of the circles.
Even Joseph Juran, one of the two American post-war germinators of the quality idea (the other was W. Edwards Deming), considered that quality circles were pretty useless if the company's management was not trained in the more general principles of total quality management.
The bottom line is that red, white and black circles cannot reveal everything about the quality of a medical practice.
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It is axiomatic in labor circles that higher pay draws in higher quality workers.
Analysts say there is concern about the quality of locally made drugs given widespread corruption in political circles in the East Africa nation.
The health care industry is one of the last industries to embrace and implement information technology--and other industries are running circles around health care in terms of efficiently delivering high quality products at decreased costs.
Over the past few decades, Bangladesh and various NGOs have instituted several educational programmes such as universal (compulsory and free) primary education and the establishment of village libraries and village study circles in an effort to provide its citizens with access to quality education and thus to promote national economic development, poverty alleviation and social empowerment and transformation.
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