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Quality and Accreditation in Health Care Services: A Global Review

This report provides an overview of the rationale, structures, activities, tools and technologies that characterize quality assurance and quality improvement and accreditation in health care. This aim is consistent with the increased worldwide interest in the quality of health systems that was reflected in – and to some extent generated by – The world health report 2000 – Health systems: improving performance. One measure of such interest is that the understanding and application of concepts and terms relevant to health systems have been continually evolving, even while this report was being prepared. This evolution is demonstrated by the term “efficiency”, which is increasingly understood to be a measure of the output of a system relative to the maximum possible output that could be achieved for a given level of input. (Thus, even at low levels of input, a country’s health system may be technically efficient, though its level of quality may still be low.) This report constitutes a snapshot – from a six-month, wide-angle exposure, carefully framed – of health systems quality and accreditation in health care. Although, as such, it is necessarily descriptive and limited in time, themes and geographical coverage, we hope it will be a significant contribution to the documentation of structures and processes that may help to inform local improvement of health services, especially in the developing countries.