Chartbook: shining a light on the quality of healthcare in Canada: what can be learned to catalyze improvements in healthcare quality?

This paper provides a reflection on the findings of Canada's first-ever chartbook on the quality of healthcare in Canada. Quality of Healthcare in Canada: A Chartbook was published in 2010 by the Canadian Health Services Research Foundation in partnership with the Canadian Institute for Health Information and the Canadian Patient Safety Institute, and with support from Statistics Canada. This paper, by the chartbook authors (Sutherland and Leatherman) and colleagues (Law, Verma and Petersen), presents selected key findings and lessons from the chartbook and aims to serve as a catalyst for ideas and discussion in the papers that follow. The chartbook identified a lack of common language and indicators on quality across Canada's provinces and territories, underscoring the need to create and coordinate core measures. The Canadian chartbook and this issue of Healthcare Papers provide an update on the existing quality measures and the state of healthcare quality in Canada, and create the opportunity for jurisdictions to learn from one another and to contemplate the steps required to improve quality across the country.