What does it mean to have quality healthcare?

In the 1990s the Institute of Medicine (IOM) defined six elements of quality care.

1. Safe—avoiding injuries to patients from the care that is intended to help them.

• Huge opportunity to educate patients on what’s painful for them and what should be avoided.
• So many people don’t stop when they feel pain.

2. Effective—providing services based on scientific knowledge to all who could benefit and refraining from providing services to those not likely to benefit.

• So much to unpack here. Although sometimes very clear, e. g. you wouldn’t want to provide a surgery to someone that didn’t need it, in other instances it would be an incredibly delicate balance to understand if someone is likely to benefit or not from a service.

3. Patient-centered—providing care that is respectful of and responsive to individual preferences, needs, and values, and ensuring that patient values guide all clinical decisions.

• Healthcare is so intimately tied with a persons needs, and values. Yet so often patients feel either uncomfortable expressing their views or like their views aren’t respected by their healthcare professional.

4. Timely—reducing waits and sometimes harmful delays for both those who receive and those who give care.

• I don’t think about delays causing harm to people who give care very often, interesting.

5. Efficient—avoiding waste, including waste of equipment, supplies, ideas, and human resources.

• Great to see a call out for efficiency.

6. Equitable—providing care that does not vary in quality because of personal characteristics, such as gender, ethnicity, geography, and socioeconomic status.

• How can this be implimented when the quality of care is based on one’s ability to pay, which is not equitable?