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The Basque Country Public Health Service has moved in the last years from considering quality as an attribute of patient care to thinking that all management can be subject to improvement. Consequently, its general management team has promoted and supported a self‐assessment experience of all their centres by means of the European Quality Model. This strategy has been facilitated by the Basque Country Government, which has strongly encouraged total quality management in companies, and has created the Basque Foundation for Quality Promotion, a key institution in this whole process. A total of 26 centres of the Public Health Service concluded a self‐assessment process. As the main result of this, different improvement areas were detected, and various necessary actions were implemented in the centres assessed. Advantages, troubles and future work lines to extend and improve the use of the EFQM model in the health sector are discussed.

The purpose of this study is to assess the appropriateness of applying the ISO 9001 quality standard to the residential aged‐care sector.

The study undertakes a prospective qualitative survey using the Delphi methodology. A panel of 14 experts in the field constitutes the panel.

ISO 9001 has certain shortcomings in the context of the residential aged‐care sector. There is a need to fit generic quality‐management models to the specific characteristics of the sector, and to integrate those generic quality management models with specialised models.

Managers of residential aged‐care services should ensure: that they have sufficient resources to implement quality‐management models; that all personnel are involved in the implementation; and that generic models are appropriately adapted to the specific needs of the aged‐care sector.

The paper provides an original conceptual overview of the application of a generic quality‐management system to a specific services sector.

The purpose of this paper is to study the appropriateness of applying “manufacturing sector” quality management strategies to residential care homes sector and to analyze its influence on the quality of care.

Observation and in‐depth interviews were conducted with 41 Spanish care home top and middle managers, consultants and employees.

The quality management paradigm based on ISO 9001 has certain shortcomings in the elderly residential care home sector. There is a need to fit general quality management models to the sector's specific characteristics and to integrate generic quality management with specialized models.

Research findings should be noted by different agents involved in the process of improving services.

Useful, up‐to‐date conceptual overview for different agents interested in the sector (managers, consultants, academics, etc.) as well as interesting evidence for reflection.