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OECD Reviews of Health Care Quality: United Kingdom 2016

Raising Standards

image of OECD Reviews of Health Care Quality: United Kingdom 2016

Health systems in the United Kingdom have, for many years, made the quality of care a highly visible priority, internationally pioneering many tools and policies to assure and improve the quality of care. A key challenge, however, is to understand why, despite being a global leader in quality monitoring and improvement, the United Kingdom does not consistently demonstrate strong performance on international benchmarks of quality. This report reviews the quality of health care in the England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, seeking to highlight best practices, and provides a series of targeted assessments and recommendations for further quality gains in health care. To secure continued quality gains, the four health systems will need to balance top-down approaches to quality management and bottom-up approaches to quality improvement; publish more quality and outcomes data disaggregated by country; and, establish a forum where the key officials and clinical leaders from the four health systems responsible for quality of care can meet on a regular basis to learn from each other’s innovations.

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Health care quality in Wales

Less than two decades after devolution, the Welsh health system remains a relatively young one; many of the institutions and mechanisms needed to promote high quality care are in place, but now a further push is needed to move towards a more mature, robust quality architecture. In many respects, “quality” is at the heart of the Welsh health system; this chapter describes Wales’ already-rich health care quality architecture. The ambition for an excellent, patient-centred health system, promoting quality, access and equity is clearly there in Wales, but now tangible practical steps are needed to make the necessary changes. This chapter makes a series of recommendations to support Wales in strengthening quality assurance and quality improvement. Assessment and recommendations are made across health system domains – from the role of accreditation and standards, to patient voice and professional training. Cutting across these domains, the priority should now be for Wales should be looking to increase accountability for delivering good quality and improving quality, and trying to establish some more concrete levers for positive system change.

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