Standardization in patient safety: the WHO High 5s project.

Quality Problem: Despite its success in other industries, process standardization in health care has been slow to gain traction or to demonstrate a positive impact on the safety of care.

Intervention: The High 5s project is a global patient safety initiative of the World Health Organization (WHO) to facilitate the development, implementation and evaluation of Standard Operating Protocols (SOPs) within a global learning community to achieve measurable, significant and sustainable reductions in challenging patient safety problems.

Goals: The project seeks to answer two questions: (i) Is it feasible to implement standardized health care processes in individual hospitals, among multiple hospitals within individual countries and across country boundaries? (ii) If so, what is the impact of standardization on the safety problems that the project is targeting?

Method: The two key areas in which the High 5s project is innovative are its use of process standardization both in hospitals within a country and in multiple participating countries, and its carefully designed multi-pronged approach to evaluation.

Deepening our understanding of quality improvement in Europe (DUQuE): overview of a study of hospital quality management in seven countries.

Introduction And Objective: This paper provides an overview of the DUQuE (Deepening our Understanding of Quality Improvement in Europe) project, the first study across multiple countries of the European Union (EU) to assess relationships between quality management and patient outcomes at EU level. The paper describes the conceptual framework and methods applied, highlighting the novel features of this study.

Design: DUQuE was designed as a multi-level cross-sectional study with data collection at hospital, pathway, professional and patient level in eight countries.

The effect of certification and accreditation on quality management in 4 clinical services in 73 European hospitals.

Objective: To investigate the relationship between ISO 9001 certification, healthcare accreditation and quality management in European hospitals.

Design: A mixed method multi-level cross-sectional design in seven countries. External teams assessed clinical services on the use of quality management systems, illustrated by four clinical pathways.

Investigating organizational quality improvement systems, patient empowerment, organizational culture, professional involvement and the quality of care in European hospitals: the 'Deepening our Understanding of Quality Improvement in Europe (DUQuE)' project.

Background: Hospitals in European countries apply a wide range of quality improvement strategies. Knowledge of the effectiveness of these strategies, implemented as part of an overall hospital quality improvement system, is limited.

Methods/design: We propose to study the relationships among organisational quality improvement systems, patient empowerment, organisational culture, professionals' involvement with the quality of hospital care, including clinical effectiveness, patient safety and patient involvement.

Towards hospital standardization in Europe.

Quality Problem: There is no simple tool to assess compliance with common national and European directives, guidance and professional advice on the management of healthcare institutions. Despite evidence of unacceptable variations in the protection of patient and staff safety little attention has been given to harmonizing the way services are organized and managed.

Initial Assessment: Existing systems which define organizational standards, or assess compliance with them, are not in a position to extend this activity into or across national borders in Europe.