Health Systems in Transition - Portugal

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7.6 Health care quality and safety
Two key documents on quality and safety were published in 2015: The National
Strategy for Health Quality 2015–2020 and the National Plan for Patient Safety
2015–2020.
The National Strategy for Health Quality (Dispatch No. 5613/2015, of
27 May 2015) aims to reinforce equity as the core dimension of the NHS in
a framework of continued improvement in quality and safety. This Strategy
highlights the need to scale up the accreditation of institutions and health care
providers and the continued investment in clinical and organizational quality
improvement. The Strategy adopts the following targets:
• focus on interventions at the local, facility and institutional levels
• clinical and organizational quality improvement
• enhanced adherence to clinical guidelines
• strengthening patient safety
• strengthening clinical research
• routine monitoring of quality and safety
• dissemination of comparable performance data
• accreditation of health care quality at facility level
• transparent information to the citizen and enhanced citizen’s capacity.
The National Plan for Patient Safety 2015–2020 (Dispatch No. 1400-A/2015,
of 10 February 2015) aims to support managers and clinicians in the NHS
to apply methods for improving management of risks associated with health
care provision. The cycle of quality improvement applied to patient safety
must identify and assess risks and place them in a hierarchy, identifying the
actions to be implemented that will lead to improvement. Management of risks
associated with health care provision should use these key principles, requiring
on the one hand the identification of existing preventive actions, and on the
other hand reactive and corrective measures following an incident. The Plan is
based on a comprehensive vision of the NHS and requires serious commitment
from all levels of health care governance, coordination and practice, in order
to harmonize existing approaches to the management of risks associated with
health care provision.