Family of instruments to evaluate hospital quality: a pilot study

Abstract

Quality assurance in health care is usually disconnected from the object of its study. Even when quality assessment belongs to the day-to-day hospital management, it is seldom integrated in the decisions, vital pieces of the hospital services management. This situation would be unacceptable in other industries. In this study we focus our attention on how to obtain knowledge about the way customers - patients, physicians, and nurses - evaluate the quality of hospitals viewed as networks of interrelated processes and systems. The purpose of these instruments to assess hospital quality is to monitor hospital quality trends of the major processes and systems of the hospital, based on the judgments of key customers. The results of these measures can be used for multiple purposes such as identifying priority areas of improvement and monitoring quality trends.