Introducing Healthcare World Standards To understand the quality of our healthcare delivery we must understand the quality of our healthcare outcomes, says Emma Sheldon MBE, Chief Operating Officer, Healthcare World
A
s the way in which we deliver healthcare has evolved, so should the way in which we measure its effectiveness. There is more data available to us now than ever before and, as such, we should be utilising that data to understand how well our systems, hospitals, clinicians and treatments are performing. It is no longer good enough to grade a healthcare setting based on its facilities or whether it employs the right practices and procedures. It is the function of healthcare to optimise health, and therefore the clinical services we provide should be based on outcomes. This is where the concept of the Healthcare World Standards comes in. The simplest metric of all is an understanding of the number of patients that come to a provider sick and leave well. But that is, of course, a massive oversimplification of what we’re trying to achieve. To provide a meaningful analysis we need to consider a huge range of factors and those factors need to be broken down into the full spectrum of specialisms. The measures of success in cancer care, for example, may have commonality with those of general practice but they will differ in some crucial ways. And to understand whether those measures represent high quality healthcare we need some baseline measurements against which we can measure success. Enter Healthcare World The Healthcare World Standards story begins in 2019 when a round table discussion, facilitated by Healthcare World Magazine between payors and providers in the Middle East, reached the question of quality. Whether you are a payor or a patient, the most obvious question around the treatment of specific conditions is always going to be where, who and what. If I am suffering from a particular condition, my primary concern is going to be the best place for treatment, who
will be the doctor treating me and which procedure are they are going to follow. But at the truly primitive level my question will be far simpler, will you make me better? Our panel concluded that, beyond existing accreditation of facilities and policies, there is no standard way to define which hospital would be the best place to be treated other than anecdotal evidence. Whether we are talking about a stroke, a heart attack or maternity care, there is simply no reliable way of telling facilities apart. The solution to the problem came in the creation of a set of individual standards for particular specialities and areas of care which we started to develop in 2020, starting with an initial grouping of the most obvious and common areas of treatment to include: • • • • • • • •
General Practice (primary care) Maternity Cancer Orthopaedics Cardiothoracic Mental Health Paediatrics General Surgery
Benchmarking The real issue with creating these standards, though, was the question of how to benchmark. What could we find that would create a real and meaningful Emma Sheldon MBE Chief Operating Officer Healthcare World
“It is the function of healthcare to optimise health, and therefore the clinical services we provide should be based on outcomes”
yardstick against which to measure the quality of clinical services from all around the globe? Headquartered, as we are, in the UK, the answer was staring us in the face - the UK’s National Health Service or NHS. Formed in 1948, the NHS is the world’s only truly free at the point of delivery health system. Paid for by taxation and available to every citizen of the United Kingdom, the NHS has a track record of delivering the highest quality of specialist care at an incredible level of value to the taxpayer. It is independent of insurers or commercial issues and has been ranked
62
HWM_003 - Standards.indd 62
17/01/2022 20:02
