ABSTRACT

This chapter explores professional, user, managerial and political views concerning quality and considers which components of healthcare might form part of any quality or performance assessment process. It reviews some of the wider issues surrounding 'quality', such as the requirement to have objectives for healthcare services in place before any assessment of service quality that can be undertaken and the need to think about what the benefits of providing a quality service will be. There are four broad perspectives on quality: professional/medical, lay/patient perspective, managerial and political. Typically, management of healthcare quality was based on the assumption that the outcome of patient care in terms of health status was down to the actions of individual clinicians. The Royal College of General Practitioners schemes which acknowledge high-quality professional care are a useful reference for those wishing to develop quality schemes, since they provide an outline of what one of the major professional organisations regard as good quality general practice.