The proper interaction of bone tissue - the natural porous biomaterial - with a porous coated intra-osseous implant is conditioned, among others, by the implant porous coating poroaccessibility for bone tissue adaptive ingrowth. The poroaccessibility is the ability of implant porous coating outer layer to accommodate the ingrowing bone tissue filling in its pore space and effective new formed bone mineralizing in the pores to form a biomechanically functional bone-implant fixation. The functional features of the microtopography of intra-osseous implant porous surfaces together with the porosity of pore space of the outer layer of the porous coating are called by bioengineers the porostructural-osteoconductive properties of the porous coated implant. The properties are crucial for successful adaptive bone tissue ingrowth and further long-term (secondary) biomechanical stability of the boneimplant interface. The poroaccessibility of intra-osseous implants porous coating outer layers is characterized by - the introduced in our previous papers - set of stereometric parameters of poroaccessibility: the effective volumetric porosity fVef, the index of the porous coating space capacity VPM, the representative surface porosity fSrep, the representative pore size pSrep, the representative angle of the poroaccessibility Wrep and the bone-implant interface adhesive surface enlargement index y. Presented in this paper, an original method of evaluation of the porostructural-osteoconductive properties of intra-osseous implant porous coatings outer layer by means of the parameters of poroaccessibility was preliminary verified during experimental tests performed on the representative examples of porous coated femoral stems and acetabular cups of various hip endoprostheses. The computer-aided stereometric evaluation of the microstructure of implant porous coatings outer layer can be now realized by the authoring application software PoroAccess_1.0 elaborated in our research team in Java programming language

The EFQM recognition system is an acknowledged method of assessing business excellence understood as the degree of implementation of quality management in an organization. The paper aims to examine whether a high rating under the EFQM recognition system simultaneously means a high general management maturity level. The investigation covers the 35 organizations that won EFQM awards in Portugal. The study is based on points awarded to organizations under the EFQM recognition system and on questionnaires/interviews with managers responsible for quality management in the studied organizations. The results indicate a positive and robust correlation between the quality management implementation (rating under the EFQM recognition system) and general management maturity. The study helps to close the gap in the literature regarding the relationship between quality management and management maturity in an organization.