Health-care Quality

Three global health-care quality reports in 2018

Universal health coverage (UHC) is the central thread of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 3. However, without improvements in the quality of the health system, UHC will prove an empty vessel and billions of people will not gain from benefits that could arrive from UHC. Instead, they will be victims of patient safety hazards, underuse of evidence-based care, overuse of inappropriate care, lack of patient-centred care, delays, inefficiency, inequity, financial insecurity, collusion, and corruption. For example, injuries from failures in patient safety are estimated to take as many lives as tuberculosis or malaria globally.1 Safety failures account for 15% of hospital costs in nations in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).1 The burden of poor quality care is especially onerous in low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs) where, because of resource limitations and poverty-related threats to health, people are especially vulnerable to quality defects in the care provided to them.

The global health-care community is now awakening to that challenge. In the past 2 years, three efforts have been mounted to delineate the size of the global health-care quality gap and identify approaches to closing it. We represent leaders from each of those efforts.

Regards

Payman Salamati, MD, MPH,

Professor of Social Medicine,

Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran.