'Standards and Stories: Articulating 'quality' in health care' - HEAL Seminar Series Event

‘Quality’ is important to health care and has become a powerful driver of health policy and practice. But what do we mean by ‘quality’ in health care and how confident are we that our efforts to improve it are securing real and important positive changes to the delivery and organisation of care and to the lives of our patients? It is increasingly recognised that the pursuit and measurement of quality in healthcare often fails to deliver anticipated benefits and may have perverse consequences, undermining rather than strengthening the characteristics it seeks to assure, and requiring excessive data gathering by health care staff: the ‘quality paradox’. In June 2013 I organised a one day colloquium at Cumberland Lodge entitled “The Many Meanings of ‘Quality’ in Health Care: Interdisciplinary Perspectives”. It brought together health professionals, academics and patient representatives to unpack the notion of ‘quality’ through presentations, workshops, discussion and debate. I went on to edit an open-access cross-journal interdisciplinary collection of the same name with publisher Biomed Central, comprising 17 academic papers written by contributors to the colloquium and their collaborators. In this presentation I will describe this project, present some of the main themes which emerged from the work and draw on the excellent contributions of my fellow contributors to articulate some suggestions for constructive approaches to improving the ‘quality’ of care, and moving beyond the quality paradox.