This week saw the release of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) National Strategy for Quality Improvement in Health Care, a detailed road map the department said will guide future efforts to make healthcare safer, more patient-centred, and more affordable.

The Strategy was called for under the Affordable Care Act, and is the first effort to create national aims and priorities to guide local, state, and national efforts to improve the quality of healthcare in the United States.

The National Quality Strategy will pursue three broad aims that will be used to guide and assess local, state, and national efforts to improve health and the healthcare delivery system:-

· Better Care: Improve the overall quality, by making healthcare more patient-centred, accessible, and safe.

· Healthy People/Healthy Communities: Improve the health of the U.S. population by supporting proven interventions to address behavioural, social and environmental determinants of health in addition to delivering higher-quality care.

· Affordable Care: Reduce the cost of quality health care for individuals, families, employers, and government.

HHS said it collaborated with clinicians, patients, payers, community agencies and other stakeholders to develop the strategy.

Here in the UK we have a number of documents which reflect our aims and ambitions for improving the quality of our healthcare system such as Quality Improvement: Theory and Practice in Healthcare.

Let us know your thoughts, how does the US Quality Improvement Strategy compare to the UK’s? Do you think there is value in creating a document like this, and do healthcare providers really follow it, should this be used as a benchmark for healthcare provision in the US?