title: Quality improvement in healthcare in New Zealand. Part 1: what would a high-quality healthcare system look like?
abstract: This Special Series attempts to define what a high-quality healthcare system would look like for New Zealand. The Series focuses on the dimensions of a quality service - safety, access, equity, effectiveness, efficiency, and patient centeredness - not only elucidating in plain language what these dimensions are, but how they might be measured and improved. The central premise is that clinicians need to become involved in measuring and improving the quality of healthcare provided. To assist clinicians, the Series will cover ways to measure the effectiveness of care they provide with articles on clinical audit and clinical indicators, and also to examine the pros and cons of the measures of efficiency used by the funders - organisational performance indicators, and benchmarking. The Series will wrap up with a vision of how we might continue to improve quality through embedding clinical governance into District Health Boards, so that their performance is measured in both quality and fiscal terms.
authors.affiliation: School of Population Health, University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland. MZSeddon@middlemore.co.nz
authors.forename: Mary
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Seddon
mesh_terms: D007722:Health Knowledge, Attitudes, Practice; D006801:Humans; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D009520:New Zealand; D011785:Quality Assurance, Health Care / Q000379:methods; D011787:Quality of Health Care; D009626:Terminology as Topic