Guiding hospitals to better themselves
Europe generally boasts a relatively high level of medical facilities, but many hospitals across the continent can learn from the leaders in the field to improve standards. The EU-funded project QUASER rose up to this challenge. Bringing together five partner countries with hospital managers, patients and other stakeholders, the project team studied cultural and organisational factors that impact hospital quality. It worked on preparing a guide to assess a hospital's quality improvement strategy. To achieve its aims, the project outlined eight quality improvement strategies related to educational, cultural, political, emotional, physical, technological, leadership and external demands. It collected data for every EU country, choosing one developing and one high-performing hospital in each to conduct interviews and document observations. QUASER focused on how the chosen hospitals dealt with quality improvement, looking at compliance, governance and accountability. It noted that many hospitals had more pressing financial concerns rather a quality improvement focus. On the other hand, it found that high-quality hospitals had integrated the concept of quality in their culture while considering cost reduction and staff motivation at the same time. These observations and others were used to help develop the guides, supported by stakeholder workshops and collected data. The project team also considered how payer organisations can facilitate quality improvement in hospitals, an issue that was also incorporated in the guides. Disseminated widely across Europe, these guides can be downloaded from the project's website and are set to encourage hospitals to better themselves. The benefits resulting from these recommendations to patients and staff could be significant.
Keywords
Hospital standards, hospital quality, compliance, governance, accountability, staff motivation, quality improvement
