Like many organizations, the health care quality improvement industry is charged with doing more with less. This can only be accomplished by careful scheduling of resources. Geographical differences in adherence to clinical guidelines have been demonstrated. In this paper, geographical analyses are used both to identify regions and providers for healthcare quality improvement targeting and to i...

Quality improvement (QI) efforts affect a broader range of people than we often assume. These are the potential stakeholders for QI and its evaluation, and they have valuable perspectives to offer when they are consulted in planning, conducting and interpreting evaluations. QI practitioners are accustomed to consulting stakeholders to assess unintended consequences or assess patient experiences...

there is an emerging consensus that caring and compassion are under threat in the frenetic environment of modern healthcare. enabling and sustaining compassionate care requires not only a focus on the needs of the patient, but also on those of the care giver. as such, threats and exhortations to health professionals are likely to have limited and perverse effects and it is to the organisational...

The mandate of Saskatchewan's Health Quality Council (HQC) is to play a hands-on role in health system transformation by working collaboratively with government, regional health authorities, health professions and citizens. Instead of the traditional, representative model, HQC is governed by an "expert board." Because board members do not represent their own organization or profession, they hav...

Received: January 27, 2017 Revised: April 21, 2017 Accepted: July 04, 2017 Abstract: Background: The emphasis on “quality” in the design of a management system for an organization was originally introduced through the work of W. Edwards Deming [1] who initially developed his QI principles to help the Toyota Motor Company increase their sales by improving the quality of their product. However, h...

In the United States, upon resident work hour restriction implementation, obstetrics and gynaecology residents’ gynaecologic surgery volume decreased and operative time per caesarean delivery increased. High volume surgeons can have clinically significantly lower complication rates than low volume surgeons, p<0.001. Decreasing surgical volumes and increasing operative time raise the question of...

BACKGROUND The monitoring of healthcare quality indicators (HCQI) is a process of utmost importance in patient healthcare services. OBJECTIVE To evaluate whether the monitoring of HCQI and the root-cause analysis improve the healthcare quality in acute myocardial infarction (AMI). METHODS A cross-sectional and comparative analysis of HCQI was performed in patients with AMI in the years 2006...

Approximately one in four adults in the UK will experience a mental health difficulty at some point in their life. This figure is approximately 400 million people worldwide.[1] Depression alone is currently estimated to cost the UK 1.7% of GDP and is one of the largest causes of ill health in the world.[2] For conditions like psychosis, evidence tells us that people have poorer quality of life ...

Introduction Medical simulation methodology is increasingly being utilised beyond the traditions of education to evaluate patient care workflows, processes, and systems within the health context. A literature review of healthcare facility testing showed that individual clinical departments and singular patient flow processes had been tested under a variety of simulated conditions, such as virtu...

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) released in December 2003 the first National Healthcare Quality Report (NHQR) and National Healthcare Disparities Report (NHDR) on behalf of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (1,2). In this commentary, we summarize the main findings of the reports on preventive care for both primary prevention of disease and secondary preventi...