Speech therapy procedure in the light of the theory of total quality management and its instruments

The article tries to show the relationship between the stages of the speech therapy procedure (Grabias, 2012) and the stages of the total quality management. To illustrate such a correlation, the article contains an original research which describes the ortophonic competence of Polish students in primary education (7–13 year-olds) and lower secondary education (13–16 year-olds). The research made use of the Pareto analysis with the Lorenz curve, which is considered the basic instrument in the quality management process. It included 277 students and three main study categories: speech disorders, articulatory errors, and speech emission and accent errors. The results of the research indicated that the use of the quality management methods within the standard speech therapy procedure is indeed helpful for its proper planning, execution, and evaluation.