Health policy
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Both public and private health and social care services are facing increased and changing demands to improve quality and reduce costs. To enable local services to respond to these demands, governments and other organisations have established large scale improvement programmes. ⋯ The purpose of this paper is to provide an empirical description of how one organisation coordinated ten national improvement programmes between 2004 and 2010. It provides details which may be useful to others seeking to plan and implement such programmes, and also contributes to the understanding of knowledge translation and of network governance.
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To demonstrate the utility of rates of change in measuring country performance in health using the rate of decline of adult mortality for 22 countries in the OECD as an illustration. ⋯ Examining the rates of change of health indicators at the country level enables finding transition times in performance, and provides a more time-sensitive measure of country performance than does assessing performances in levels of health. The effects of changes in potential determinants of health can then be assessed in terms of their relation to transition times in performance.