Improving the quality of care in health systems: towards better strategies

Improving the quality of health care across a nation is complex and hard. Countries often rely on multiple single national level programmes to make progress. But the key is to use a framework to develop a balanced overall strategy, and evaluate the main elements continuously and over time. Achieving that requires having a critical mass of leaders who collectively can see the bigger picture now, envision a roadmap for the future to chart an intelligent course, and course correct regularly. This is a long-term agenda requiring commitment, careful stewardship, different perspectives, trust, and the building of knowledge and experience over time. It is also almost completely at odds with much current policymaking which is short term, reactive and demands hard results. Many countries are making progress. But the rapid introduction of new types of care during the COVID 19 pandemic, such as online and digital, the use of new technologies which could soon revolutionalise the way care is delivered, experienced and evaluated, and the huge pressures on spending on health care in future mean we will have to do better. Achieving system-wide quality of care requires having a critical mass of leaders who collectively can see the bigger picture now, envision a roadmap for the future to chart a balanced intelligent course. For the Israeli health system, the recent IJHPR article by Dreiher et al. will help, but it will be important, in the future, to analyse how Israel measures up on the framework outlined above. This ideally would be supplemented with a survey of key leaders for their assessment, and both would be a regular (say 5 yearly) exercise and would help inform future strategies.