Introducing Healthcare World Standards

To understand the quality of our healthcare delivery, we must understand the quality of our healthcare outcomes

As the way in which we deliver healthcare has evolved, so should the way in which we measure its effectiveness. There is more data available to us now than ever before and we should be utilising that data to understand how well our systems, hospitals, clinicians and treatments are performing.

It is the function of healthcare to optimise health, and assessment of clinical services we provide should be based on outcomes.

The simplest metric of all is an understanding of the number of patients that come to a provider sick and leave well. But that is, of course, a massive oversimplification of what we’re trying to achieve.

To provide a meaningful analysis we need to consider a huge range of factors that need to be broken down into the full spectrum of specialisms. The measures of success in cancer care, for example, may have commonality with those of general practice but they will differ in some crucial ways.

Healthcare World has been working on the creation of a set of individual standards for particular specialities and areas of care to include:

Emma Sheldon Director of Consultancy

Email me for more: emma.sheldon@healthcareworld.com

Healthcare World Standards are benchmarked against the UK’s National Health Service or NHS. Formed in 1948, the NHS is the world’s only truly free at the point of delivery health system with a track record of delivering the highest quality specialist care. It is independent of insurers or commercial issues and has been ranked consistently over the last ten years as the best health system in the world by the Commonwealth Fund, containing world-renowned facilities such as Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children and The Royal Marsden Hospital for cancer.

Measuring the efficiency and quality of primary care against the levels of quality, provision and access to care enjoyed by UK citizens is the first step for the Healthcare World Standards programme. Together with Health Care First, an NHS primary care provider in the North of England, and Methods Analytics as a data partner, the Healthcare World Standard in Primary Care is well under way.

Over the coming months we will be working with a variety of NHS organisations to create standards in all ten initial specialist areas to offer healthcare providers, regulators and insurers all over the world the first truly meaningful, outcomes-based accreditation standards in clinical services. We hope you’ll join us on the journey.