ABSTRACT
Health quality indicators are developed by diverse organizations for many dierent purposes. Health organizations and national and/or regional health authorities oen develop and use them to survey activities. Professional colleges may design them to monitor the quality of delivered care, mainly within the framework of continuous quality improvement (CQI) projects. A health board can draw up indicators for internal monitoring of specic problems. Accreditation/certication systems and quality benchmarking activities usually agree on the indicators to be adopted in their processes. Given these large, diversied elds of application, knowing how to draw up and use general health quality indicators and how to design indicators for ad hoc purposes has become a preeminent necessity. e rst part of this chapter deals with quality indicator terminology, while the second part illustrates examples of indicators that were developed specically for radiotherapy.
