The first national strategy on quality of care, patient safety and patient experience is being developed in Greece. It aims to build, strengthen and consolidate healthcare quality through national policies.
The project has been launched by the Athens Office of Quality of Care and Patient Safety of the WHO, within the framework of the European Work Programme, 2020-2025 United Action for Better Health in Europe, in collaboration with the Greek Ministry of Health, the Agency for Quality Assurance in Europe. Health (ODIPY), and with the support of the European Commission (DG REFORM).
Greece, like many other European countries, faces challenges in the healthcare sector. Dr. ValterFonseca, health systems technical officer at the Office of Quality of Care and Patient Safety in Athens, told Euractiv, adding that we need to build more resilient, more sustainable and more efficient systems across the world and the European region.
The Commission is committed to turning this project into concrete actions on the ground that will improve the quality of healthcare in Greece, a Commission spokesperson told Euractiv. They explained that the Commission offers tailored technical support to many EU Member States through the Technical Support Instrument (TSI) to facilitate reforms in the health sector.
For DrValterFonseca, a care quality perspective is necessary to achieve universal healthcare coverage.
If you just increase access and don’t ensure that the services people receive are of high quality, you won’t necessarily increase health outcomes.
In the case of Greece, the Commission is aware of the need to improve access to treatments, strengthen the patient experience and help maintain high-quality care services such as rehabilitation, mental health and care long term. Improving the quality, resilience and sustainability of the healthcare system is a key objective for the Greek authorities, the Commission spokesperson told Euractiv.
Customized health policies
The Athens office highlighted the need for personalized health policies and evidence-based measures in the Greek health system to address challenges and address health care quality disparities.
At the same time, there are challenges at each care level and for all of them.
Care quality aims to have a system that follows the patient wherever the patient is, remarked Dr. Fonseca. It doesn’t matter if it’s primary or hospital care. It is about the patient at the center of the system, and the system is adjusting to the needs of the patient. All levels of care work together to meet people’s needs, he added.
But there are different challenges. For example, healthcare-associated infections are a major challenge for hospital care. Greece is taking important steps to strengthen primary health care, and we are here to consolidate and support them.
Since one of the challenges of the Greek system is to reduce health inequalities from a care quality perspective, the way to address this is through the involvement of all health regions, as explained by Dr. Fonseca, referring to a series of workshops with the seven health regions.
Patient safety and effectiveness is another important dimension of care quality that should be strengthened and consolidated. People need to feel safe when they receive care, explains the WHO technical officer.
For the WHO team, the development of this strategy must be done in a participatory manner.
This means involving patients, families and carers. The Association of Greek Patients is invited to the workshops to add patients’ perspectives to consultations.
Governance and data
According to Fonseca, governance is also a key factor in a quality-oriented health system. We are also working on how to better govern quality in terms of teams, people, their training and skills.
It also underscores the importance of data to quality of care and patient safety. For any decision-making process, data is a critical element, he said.
This strategy also focuses on training and building the capacity of professionals who can then use a more diverse skill set to engage in data collection and, more importantly, learn from the data, he added.
It also clarifies that standardization does not mean that it is necessary to do everything in the same way without taking into account the specificities of each country, each region or each population. Similar projects will be developed for other countries.
clear message
The plan’s strategic objectives move along two axes: One is the vision of care quality. The second is to define it so that everyone can understand it, said Valter Fonseca.
If you understand what quality care is, you will be the first to demand quality, he explains. The most important thing we can do is for everyone to demand more quality.
Specific targets will be set for the system to work towards, along with a training curriculum for everyone working in hospitals, including managers, with guidance on what is needed to strengthen care quality across the country.
Implementation
Together with the WHO, the Commission has designed the technical support in a way that would address Greece’s most crucial priorities in a clear and structured way that is fully in line with the realities of the Greek health system, the spokesperson said the Commission.
The TSI project on strengthening the quality of care in Greece has now entered a crucial stage, that of discussing with national, regional and local actors in each health region before putting in place the key elements of the new strategy on quality of care, they added. .
The first step of the project is to collect the best practices of European countries on care quality and patient safety and to have a very solid scientific background.
The second step is the consultation with the interest groups, the seven workshops, one per health region, which Fonseca describes as the heart of the project.
We are here taking a bottom-up approach. So, first of all we listen to the voice of the people, what they consider to be the main challenges of the country and of each region, the priorities and the recommendations regarding the quality of care.
Sometimes people think that a strategy is just a document, said Fonseca, I think this is the first step to ensure that it will be implemented.
The final step is to collect all the input from the first two steps to write a strategy.
Our effort is always to translate recommendations into real-life actions. With the support of the Director of the Country Health Systems and Policies Division, Dr. Natasha Azzopardi Muscat, and the Head of the Athens Office of Quality of Care and Patient Safety, Dr. Joao Breda, we are working hard to improve the quality of care and patient safety across the WHO European Region based on recommendations.”
“But this is not a project that WHO/Europe is doing alone. This is the Ministry of Health of Greece, which is very committed to the project, together with ODIPY and the funds of the European Commission, all working towards this goal. So, we are firmly convinced that it will be a set of recommendations that, over time, can be translated into concrete actions, explained Fonseca.
[By Vasiliki Angouridi, Edited by Brian Maguire | Euractiv’s Advocacy Lab]
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