Quality in Hospitals in Europe

DUQuE “Deepening our understanding of quality improvement in Europe” is a research project financed by the EU 7th Research Framework Programme. This 42-month project started in November 2009 and its end is foreseen for April 2013.

The main goal of the DUQuE project is to study the effectiveness of quality improvement systems in European hospitals. This will be done by assessing the relationship of organisational quality improvement systems/management and culture, professionals’ involvement, and patient empowerment with the quality of hospital care (including clinical effectiveness, patient safety and patient involvement).

Design

DUQuE will collect data using a cross-sectional, observational study of European hospitals. Data will be collected at hospital, departmental, professional and patient levels. Hospitals in the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Turkey and the United Kingdom will participate.

Expected outcomes

Two main research outputs are expected:

  • Hospital guidance - an in-depth overview on the effectiveness of quality and safety strategies and on how to integrate them in hospitals
  • Appraisal scheme for purchasers - identifying the core quality and safety strategies that should be in place in European hospitals.

 

DUQuE Offers Benchmarking Facility to Participating Hospitals

The DUQUE consortium has released the Benchmarking platform for participating hospitals to compare performance data collected in 2011 and 2012 (http://benchmarking.duque.eu/).

The benchmarking platform was designed for contributing organisations to provide comparative performance data on a selected set of indicators in four domains:

1. Governance, quality management and culture;

2. Clinical effectiveness outcomes;

3. Patient involvement outcomes,

4. Mortality outcome.

The platform allows easy access to indicators in these domains. It is based on the responses of about 10,000 professionals that contributed to surveys on governance, quality management and hospital cultures and more than 9,000 and 6,500 patients that contributed data for chart reviews and patient surveys, respectively. It is expected that the platform contributes to initiating discussions and reflections on the extent the hospital engages in quality management and improvement, and on the patient level outcomes that are achieved.