Quality in health care : QHC
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To identify the desirable characteristics of review criteria for quality improvement and to determine how they should be selected. ⋯ The desirable characteristics for review criteria have been identified and will be of use in the development, evaluation, and selection of review criteria, thus improving the cost effectiveness of quality improvement activities in healthcare settings.
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Editorial Comment
Choosing effective strategies for quality improvement.
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To describe the use, perceived effectiveness, and predicted future use of organisational strategies for influencing clinicians' behaviour in the approach of NHS trusts to clinical governance, and to ascertain the perceived benefits of clinical governance and the barriers to change. ⋯ Clinical governance leads of trusts report using a range of strategies for influencing clinician behaviour and plan to use a similar range in the future. The choice of methods seems to be related to past experience of local use, despite equivocal judgements of their perceived effectiveness in the trusts. Most expect to achieve a positive impact on patient outcomes as a result. It is concluded that trusts should establish methods of learning what strategies are effective from their own data and from external comparison.
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Patients' evaluations are an important means of measuring aspects of primary care quality such as communication and interpersonal care. This study aims to examine variations in assessments of primary care according to age, gender, socioeconomic, and ethnicity variables. ⋯ Differences exist between identifiable subgroups of the population in their assessments of primary health care measured using the GPAS instrument. This work adds to the literature on variation in healthcare experience and the potential for patient assessment of primary care. Further work is required to investigate these differences in more detail and to relate them to differences in the nature and process of primary care provision. Primary care providers need to ensure that services provided are appropriate for all patient groups within their communities.