Avedis Donabedian, who created the conceptual framework for quality assessments of health services, was interviewed shortly before his death in November 1999. He described the health care problems that he had encountered during his battle with cancer that lasted nearly three decades. Jan Gregoire Coombs quotes Donabedian in his last interview on page 277 of her book as follows: I have tried to ...

Avedis Donabedian is the most influential thinker on the quality of health care. Through a corpus of articles, books and lectures spanning more than three decades, he has laid the foundations for a deeper understanding of this important area of health systems. His seminal paper of 1966 (1) introduced the concepts of structure, process and outcomes, which remain to our day as the dominant paradi...

Quality control is mandatory, not only for inpatients but also for ambulatory surgery. We propose a list of indices which respond to the key properties of health care that have been defined by Donabedian. These indices should be part of a computerized quality control program which allows comparative evaluation between different centers. © 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.