Organizing for Quality – The Improvement Journeys of Leading Hospitals in Europe and the United States

Citation

(2008), "Organizing for Quality – The Improvement Journeys of Leading Hospitals in Europe and the United States", International Journal of Health Care Quality Assurance, Vol. 21 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijhcqa.2008.06221eae.003

Organizing for Quality – The Improvement Journeys of Leading Hospitals in Europe and the United States

Article Type: Recent publications From: International Journal of Health Care Quality Assurance, Volume 21, Issue 5

Paul Bate, Peter Mendel and Glenn Robert,Radcliffe Publishing,2008,ISBN-10 1 84619 151 3; ISBN-13 9781846191510

Keywords: Quality service provision, Quality improvement processes, Evidence based delivery

Foreword by Donald M Berwick, President and CEO, Institute of Healthcare Improvement and Clinical Professor of Paediatrics and Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School, USA.

This challenging and highly practical book draws on the findings from an international study designed to help practitioners and researchers understand the factors and processes that enable healthcare organisations in the US and Europe to achieve – and sustain – high quality services for their users.

The in-depth case studies from seven leading hospitals give an international, evidence-based outlook that focuses on both the organisational and cultural processes of quality improvement.

Implication for research and practice are considered, and a checklist of possible challenges has been drawn up to help identify any “gaps” in initiatives.

Healthcare policy makers and shapers including hospital chief executives and NHS directors will find this book enlightening, as will healthcare quality improvement and service development researchers and professionals. Clinicians with an interest in quality improvement will also find much of interest.

Looking is not seeing. Listening is not hearing. It is possible to miss so much that is right in front of us if we lack the categories and skills to notice. The greatest of these skills is, perhaps, to put aside our expectations, and to stay open to the actual. [The authors] are expert at noticing. With their guidance, dear reader, get ready to see things you do not yet know how to see, and to hear what you do not yet know to listen for. I commend this book to the student of change (Donald M. Berwick, in the Foreword).

Contents include:

• •

  The art, the science, and the sociology of improvement: San Diego Children’s Hospital.

• •

  Organisational and professional identity: crisis, tradition and quality at the Royal Devon and Exeter NHS Foundation Trust.

• •

  Organisational learning and sustained improvement: the quality journey at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles.

• •

  Building a system of leadership for quality improvement: a Dutch hospital in pursuit of perfection.

• •

  Smart socio-technical design in healthcare organisations: sustaining quality improvement at the Luther Midelfort Mayo Health System.

• •

  Empowering quality: demonstration and democratisation at the Peterborough and Stamford Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.

• •

  Mobilizing for quality: the case of an HIV/AIDS treatment center in Albany, New York.

• •

  A practitioners’ codebook for the quality journey.

• •

  Towards a process model of organizing for quality.

• •

  Journey’s end: epilogue and final reflections.