Quality Healthcare Delivery Guidebook

Quality Healthcare Delivery Guidebook

Purpose and objectives

The purpose of this document is to serve as a guidebook for healthcare practitioners to improve the quality of care and delivery within their organisations. This document will cover the background principles of quality healthcare delivery, steps and guidelines for effective healthcare delivery, useful measurements and evaluation tools, implementation processes, and a case study of quality healthcare delivery.

A practical and technical resource for quality improvement initiatives in healthcare delivery is important to continue to ensure a consistent and rigorous standard of healthcare for patients globally, in order to ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all ages, as outlined in the U.N. sustainable development goals. (World Health Organization, 2018)

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Background information

As the complexity and number of healthcare conditions increases globally, and as the global population continues to rise, healthcare practitioners and organisations are increasingly under strain to continue providing quality healthcare to their patients and constituents. It is important that healthcare practitioners such as doctors and nurses have access to a practical guide to improve the quality of care and delivery within their organisations, in terms of guidance, implementation, manuals, guidelines, frameworks, capacity building and assessment. (World Health Organization, 2018)

Improvements in quality healthcare delivery apply to a variety of areas, which include infection prevention and control, emergency room care, community engagement, patient safety, hospital management, palliative care, blood safety and primary care. Although these different areas of healthcare and medical practice have unique needs, common practices to improve the quality of care and delivery of organisations in delivering services in these areas can be used. (World Health Organization, 2018)

Principles of Quality Healthcare

Generally, quality healthcare delivery is governed by the following seven principles of effectiveness, safety, people-centricity, timeliness, equity, integratedness and efficiency. (World Health Organization, 2018)

Foremost, quality healthcare delivery should be effective, in providing evidence-based care to the patients who require them most. Quality healthcare should also be safely conducted, and minimise or eliminate harms linked to helathcare. People-centric quality healthcare is also key, and healthcare practitioners should strive to engage individuals, families and communities with a firm respect for specific cultural norms. Healthcare delivery should also be timely, equitable, integrated and efficient to the furthest extent possible, and seek to administer fair treatment without discrimination to background, while minimising wait times and resource use inefficiencies.

Steps and guidelines to quality healthcare improvement

This document will cover the general steps in quality healthcare delivery, and the plan, do, check and act model (PDCA). However, healthcare organisation management teams may also consider other models, such as failure modes and effects analysis, Six Sigma, Lean and root-cause analysis to improve the quality of healthcare delivery. (Hughes, 2008)

General steps in quality healthcare delivery

Quality healthcare delivery should comply with the following steps to ensure effective delivery.

Foremost, senior leadership of the healthcare organization should be committed to open sharing and continual improvement in the delivery of quality healthcare.

Secondly, people and teams in the healthcare organization should have a strong sense of ownership, and should be empowered to continually improve various processes at their own work levels.

Thirdly, the healthcare organization should work with families and communities to develop locally identified solutions. In particular, a 2018 study by Bombard et al found that healthcare organizations need to empower and involve patients beyond tokenistic patient feedback, in order to better inform patient and provider policies, and to improve service delivery and governance. (Bombard et al, 2018)

Fourthly, the healthcare organization’s management team should specifically delineate the roles and responsibilities of various team members.

Fifthly, the healthcare organization should continuously measure improvements in various quality healthcare delivery trials and adapt the organization accordingly to learn and improve past mistakes.

Finally, the healthcare organization’s management team should implement feedback and incentive policies