News and Developments

Seven ways to improve quality and safety in hospitals - eBook

This eBook aims to provide a framework and evidence to assess and improve the quality and safety in hospitals. It is directed at managers and clinical leaders.

The eBook is based on state-of-the-art research and synthesises the results of the DUQuE Project and other large-scale empirical studies, systematic reviews, and expert knowledge.

The key findings of this synthesis are reflected in the "Seven ways to improve quality and safety". We do hope that this publication will be helpful in facilitating quality and safety efforts in your hospital.

Sincerely,

Oliver Groene and Rosa Sunol, on behalf of the DUQuE Project.

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.

DUQuE Final Conference- 17th December 2012, Berlin, Germany.

In light of great advances in the assessment and improvement of quality of care, policymakers, healthcare providers and researchers are keen to evaluate the effectiveness of various quality improvement governance approaches, particularly at the hospital level.

The DUQuE project, led by a consortium of prestigious research centres and universities in the field of health care quality in Europe, provides promising theoretical insights and evidence-based toolkits related to improving the effectiveness of quality improvement systems in hospitals.

Using data from 188 hospitals from seven European countries (Czech Republic, France, Germany, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Turkey), the four year multi-method project assessed the relationship of various quality improvement governance approaches with quality indicators of hospital care (specifically clinical effectiveness, patient safety and patient reported outcomes).

The conference will enable the presentation of DUQuE’s main findings, and provide a friendly, open forum for the discussion of the results. Evidence-based guidance documents, practical toolkits and appraisal schemes for hospital managers, purchasing agencies and governments interested in the development and assessment of hospital quality improvement systems will also be presented. The conference attendance will be free.

To register, send your request to duque@uk-koeln.de

Country coordinators meetings

Data collection of the project and recruitement of 30 hospitals in 8 countries participating in the field test require very specific skills. Thanks to the involvement of Country Coordinators, this part of the project is proceeding with their collaboration. The first meeting of the Country Coordinators took place in Cracow (Poland) on 8/9 September 2010. Then, in 2011 the Country Coordinators met on 16/17 February in Istanbul (Turkey) and on 8 June in London (United Kingdom). The following meeting of Country Coordinators took place on 29 September 2011 in Paris, France.

The partners of the projects last met in Paris on 19-20 September 2012, following meetings in November 2011 (Paris), March 2012 (Barcelona), and July 2012 (Amsterdam).

First DUQuE article published

In September 2010 DUQuE partners published the first project article. The DUQuE protocol article appeared in BMC Health Services Research. The full text and PDF of the article can be accessed via the following link: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6963/10/281/abstract