Person-centred care and measurement: The more one sees, the better one knows where to look
Determining the quality of a health system is a complex and challenging endeavour. The variety of perspectives needed to determine quality means that increasingly complex measurement frameworks are often employed. Providing the best possible health care has always been a priority for health system leaders, individual professions and individual professionals. But the importance and significance of measuring quality has increased since the evolution of quality-improvement methodologies for health-care quality standardisation in the 1990s.
Audit and feedback systems evolved into quality-control methods with the increased industrialisation of health systems. As the patient voice became increasingly important, with the rise in advocacy groups and patient-representative organisations, the focus on controlling the quality of services through a managerialist ideology was challenged. Broader, more inclusive, approaches to quality were embraced. Quality-improvement methodologies aim to adopt an inclusive approach to ongoing quality enhancement, ensuring that services are continuously developed and improved. This evolutionary context is ...