Improving Quality in Healthcare: A Comprehensive Guide

By Murray Anderson-Wallace, Nick Downham

This book is for anyone interested in enhancing quality in healthcare. It appeals to those traditionally responsible for quality matters, practicing clinicians, leaders, and most importantly, interested citizens. It serves as a deliberate antidote to the anti-intellectual, QI tool-driven, mechanistic approach that dominates much of healthcare quality improvement work.

The authors, with extensive experience in quality issues in healthcare at national, regional, and local levels, challenge such approaches. They believe these methods fail to consider patient and organizational context, leading to reductionism, cherry-picking, atomization of complex issues, and ultimately, simplistic and unsustainable outcomes.

Key Features of the Book

This book offers:

• A thorough exploration of often-overlooked and misunderstood core concepts of quality, including their history and meaning in a contemporary context.
• A framework to “question the work” using four interconnected conceptual domains. This serves as a valuable framework to consider improving quality and reducing failure demand.
• A critical re-examination of the dominant approaches to change frequently adopted in “quality” work. Many of these are rooted in scientific management and have failed to live up to their promise, particularly transformational change.
• Exploration of how an inter-disciplinary perspective can reframe aspects of quality thinking.

Product Details

Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd; 1st edition (February 19, 2024)

Language: English

Format: Hardcover

Pages: 224

ISBN-10: 1529733065

ISBN-13: 978-1529733068