OBJECTIVES To examine how organizational factors affect good care and mistreatment of older people in care homes. METHODS Eight residential care homes for older people (including private sector, local authority and NHS providers) took part in a participatory observation-based study of organizational factors affecting care quality. RESULTS Grouping organizational factors into infrastructure,...

From the Undersecretary of Health, Mexico City, Mexico. Corresponding author: Enrique Ruelas, MD, Undersecretary for Innovation and Quality, Secretary of Health of Mexico, Lieja 7, 1er. piso, Col. Juarez 06696, Mexico D.F. vey respondents rated quality as the major health care problem, followed by insufficient resources (30%), limited access (11%), and high costs (9%) (1). Interestingly, when t...

BUMC PROCEEDINGS 2001;14:34–35 According to a recent article, Texas is in the lowest quartile of states in its delivery of health care to patients >65 years of age (1). Physicians may wonder how these statistics came about and how Baylor Health Care System (BHCS) is trying to improve health care quality. This article begins by defining quality. It then discusses the performance measures and the...

All rights reserved. The reproduction or use of this work in any form or in any information storage and retrieval system is forbidden without the express, written permission of the publisher. Printed in the USA. iii The Quality Measurement and Management Project (QMMP) is a hospital industry sponsored initiative to develop quality monitoring and management toots of choice for hospitals. iv QMMP...

BACKGROUND In 2007 the European Commission issued the White Paper: "Together for Health". Considered the EU Health Strategy for the years 2008-2013, it offers the cornerstones for setting priorities in EU health actions. OBJECTIVES The public health framework offered in this strategy is explicitly built on shared values--including the overarching values of universality, access to good quality...

With over one million service members separating from the military over the next several years, it seems prudent to ask whether U.S. health care professionals and systems of care are prepared to evaluate and treat the obvious and more subtle injuries ascribed to military deployment and combat. The authors suggest that several systemic interventions-adding military health history sections to ele...

The Value-Driven Health Care initiative and the Executive Order (EO) that underpins it invert the cost/quality equation and proceed from the premise that improving quality first--in terms of both care and system management--will reduce costs and elevate value. Equally essential to the success of the initiative is transparency: access to information that will empower consumers to save on quality...

Background Access to quality obstetric care is considered essential to reducing maternal and new-born mortality. We evaluated the effect of the introduction of a multifaceted voluntary health insurance programme on hospital deliveries in rural Nigeria. Methods We used an interrupted time-series design, including a control group. The intervention consisted of providing voluntary health insuran...

The Affordable Care Act upholds a major goal to improve quality and population health. To date, major advances have pushed forward concepts and measures in health care quality, focusing primarily on clinical settings. However, the development of such quality concepts and measures in the broader arena of public health has lagged behind those in the narrower world of health care. Closing that “qu...

This is the story of the martyrdom of an idea, an organization that embodied that idea, its director, and a group of staff and volunteers committed to making it work. The idea is that the comparable outcomes of hospital care should be measured and publicly reported so people could choose high quality care. This idea was embodied in a small organization called Greater Cleveland Health Quality Ch...