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Article: Making quality improvement a priority.(Guest Editorial)
- Article from:
- Skin & Allergy News
- Article date:
- April 1, 2008
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2008 International Medical News Group. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Health care errors have received a great deal of press lately, which is no surprise given that 784,000 deaths per year are attributed to medical injuries. It follows that quality assurance in health care is a hot topic these days as well, and that's a good thing, but change needs to be about more than quality assurance--it needs to be about quality improvement.
An inspection of quality issues in health care reveals a number of common themes associated with medical errors. For example, in many cases it is not a single error but a convergence of multiple errors that occurs. Inconsistent processes, a lack of process metrics, tremendous variations in practice, and ...