Quality of Healthcare in Canada : A Chartbook
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Resources
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About the Chartbook
Assessing healthcare quality is a crucial step in improving care and service delivery. Data on the quality and performance of healthcare hold the potential to guide quality improvement activities; redesign services; keep people and organizations accountable for their performance; change policy and practice; and inspire public debate. By collecting, analyzing and reporting healthcare data, it becomes possible to identify the areas where performance is deficient, develop solutions, galvanize action, and monitor progress.
Many national, provincial, territorial and regional healthcare organizations in Canada have undertaken initiatives to report on the state of quality for a specific jurisdiction, area of delivery or unique dimension of quality. To date, other countries – including the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia – have successfully embarked upon activities to draw together data to assess various aspects of quality, compare themselves on an international scale and ultimately, improve the quality of care and service delivery to patients (Leatherman and McCarthy, 2002; Leatherman et al, 2008; Clinical Excellence Commission, 2008). However, there have been no reports that provide a comprehensive and rigorous account of the overall quality of healthcare in Canada in relation to national and international benchmarks.
Building on the success of the chartbook model, the Canadian Health Services Research Foundation (CHSRF), the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI), and the Canadian Patient Safety Institute (CPSI) have jointly commissioned, with support from Statistics Canada, the first-ever Canadian chartbook on healthcare quality. This chartbook provides data on the quality and performance of healthcare, serving as a tool to support and inform policy and management decision-making, to identify gaps in data, to highlight potential areas for investment in quality improvement, and to provide a baseline for future analysis.
