The Healthcare World Primary Care Standards Developed with Primary Care experts Health Care First and our data partners at Methods Analytics
E
very patient in any country has the right to expect a quality of service that is measurable and measured. Standards are the explicit statements of expected quality in the performance of a healthcare activity against which these services can be evaluated. In addition, standards allow healthcare institutions to demonstrate internationally recognised levels of performance and outcomes. They can include governance, leadership, infection prevention and control as well as clinical practice guidelines, standard operating procedures, critical paths and treatment protocols. Standards can also be used to allow benchmarking between various organisations, enabling improvements to be incorporated. By giving reassurance to patients that their treatment and healthcare
facility operates at a recognised national or international level, they are able to have confidence in the declared outcomes. Equally, standards give governments and ministerial healthcare departments a measurable system for an overview of national healthcare offerings. Wellconstructed indicators can inform improvement through understanding how a healthcare system works and how it could be improved, to monitor how a healthcare system or service is performing against standards and provide accountability to patients, to providers and to national healthcare bodies. Developing and implementing a robust clinical standard Access to data permits measurement and meaningful standards, enabling easy cross
reference across various specialities. It provides an understanding of the service, its scope, size of cohort of patients and how it fits with wider healthcare systems. Thorough metadata should answer a number of questions and provide measurements to answer what, when, how, where and why. It also provides knowledge of types of indicator - count, rate, ratio, percentage, mean and binary. By ensuring the data is consistent across healthcare providers, it can be constantly reviewed to ensure the indicators are meaningful and provide insight. As healthcare becomes ever more complex, performance and accountability are important to ensure equitable high quality care. By monitoring a system or service to ascertain whether it is performing against expectation, the healthcare organisation provides accountability not only to themselves but to patients, other providers, national healthcare bodies and insurers. Background Patients and payors have a clear interest in understanding healthcare provision. The Healthcare World Standard for each
64
HWM_003 - Standards.indd 64
17/01/2022 20:02
