From “Don't Ask, Just Trust” to “Trust Those Who are Accountable”

Abstract

The past three decades have primarily focused on improving performance across health care providing organizations and even individual professionals. While their interest in performance improvement is global, the strategies across health care systems remain variable and the resulting methods of accountability to select audiences continue to be influenced by tradition and expectation. The purpose of this article is to review the key dimensions of the operationalization of performance measurement and the translation of its findings to statements about quality of care. While significant literature exists on the conceptual debates about the nature of quality, the deciding factor in demonstrating that better quality may have been achieved resides in the acceptability of the measurement tools to translate performance measures into profiles of quality. Fundamentally, the use of the tools is seen as only one component of a successful strategy – the education of various audiences as to what the measures mean not only is a necessary requisite for sound project design but also will determine how the accountability model is shaped in each environment based on the generic measurement tools results, local traditions of care and caring, and expectations about outcomes.