Everybody wants quality health care. Why wouldn’t they?
This belief, which underpins the work of Health Quality Ontario, was recently endorsed by no less than the World Health Organization, World Bank and Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development Countries in a major report on global health care. They stated “even with essential health coverage and financial protection, health outcomes would still be poor if services were low-quality and unsafe”.
In a recent commentary in the CMAJ, we summarized data demonstrating that the quality of health care in Canada is good but not great. We also made several suggestions for improvement. In the article, we focused not on the things that individual clinicians could do differently, but rather on decisions that managers, administrators and policy makers can make. While most quality improvement initiatives are necessarily local, we feel certain key steps could be taken across the whole country.