ABSTRACT
Healthcare today involves more specialists than ever before, looking after patients with more conditions, on more medications, receiving their care in more locations. In today's consumer-orientated society, one of the cornerstones of supplying goods and services is their quality. Approaches to quality in healthcare, and thinking about how best to improve it, have evolved over the last 50 years. Some quality philosophies, their practical tools and their models for achieving beneficial change are transient: flavours of the year. One of the most important classifications of quality in healthcare was propounded by Avedis Donabedian. The traditional approach to quality control in industry was based on the concept of inspection to detect defects. This has major disadvantages. Another way in which quality can be viewed is the extent to which the healthcare interventions of known effectiveness are properly applied in the case of individual patients.
