Study finds improved access to care is not sufficient to improve health
In a world first, a study has quantified the burden of poor-quality healthcare systems worldwide and found that improved access to care is not sufficient to improve health. These findings come from an analysis published in The Lancet as part of a two-year project called The Lancet Global Health Commission on High Quality Health Systems, in which 30 academics, policymakers and health system experts from 18 countries examined how to measure and improve health system quality worldwide.
In a world first, a study has quantified the burden of poor-quality healthcare systems worldwide and found that improved access to care is not sufficient to improve health. These findings come from an analysis published in The Lancet as part of a two-year project called The Lancet Global Health Commission on High Quality Health Systems, in which 30 academics, policymakers and health system experts from 18 countries examined how to measure and improve health system quality worldwide.
The analysis found that poor-quality care is responsible for around five million of the 8.6 million deaths per year from conditions that are treatable by healthcare. It surmised that global efforts to expand access to care through Universal Health Coverage will be wasted if health system quality does not improve.
“Quality care should not be the purview of the elite, or an aspiration for some distant future; it should be the DNA of all health systems," said Commission Chair Dr Margaret E Kruk, of Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, US. “The human right to health is meaningless without good quality care. High-quality health systems put people first. They generate health, earn the public's trust, and can adapt when health needs change. Countries will know they are on the way towards high-quality, accountable health systems when health workers and policymakers choose to receive healthcare in their own public institutions.”
The Commission found that many current improvement approaches have limited effectiveness and that commonly used health system metrics such as availability of medicines, equipment or the proportion of births with skilled attendants do not reflect quality of care and might lead to false complacency about progress. It has called for fewer but better measures of health systems quality and has proposed a dashboard of metrics that should be implemented by counties by 2021 to enable transparent measurement and reporting of quality care.