Quality of health care across Europe is increasingly important issue because of growing mobility of both professionals and patients. We observe considerable differences between national systems in ensuring of high quality care. In primary care quality improvement(QI) is a new development.
Central and Eastern European Countries are only in the beginning of implementation of QI activities not only in General Practitioner (GP)/Family Doctor (FD) practices, but also in hospital level. In order to accelerate the speed of adoption of QI and to avoid the repetition of mistakes, GPs from different parts of Europe should be supported by appropriate teaching programmes (at LLL level) in that field, that help them in studying of examples in their fellow countries and adapting it in their everyday practice.
The presented inGPinQI project that is aimed at improvement of the existing training programs for both, GPs and teachers of family medicine and their competencies in the field of QI is foreseen as way of overcoming that situation and increasing the number of participants attending the LLL medical education.
The general intention of the inGPinQI project was to improve the existing training programs for both, GPs and teachers in family medicine (FM) in the field of QI by implementing new innovative didactic tools and methods in existing educational systems in Europe supported by Information/Internet Technology (IT).
It has provided them with appropriate tools (e.g. a SAQ tool for measuring their gap competencies and educational needs, a DocQI online course, other educational materials for VET trainings) supported by IT technology, that can improve their skills and quality of the patient care.
The project was focused on: (1) hypertension and (2) diabetes mellitus which appear as the most important problems of public health in Europe.
Two reports with the systematic overview of the existing training programs in QI and successfully implemented quality projects have been developed in the project supporting us in creating an important European perspective that couldn't be achieved based on experience from one country only. Data included in the reports may be used to stimulate interest of family medicine teachers on QI topics. A description of quality projects undertaken in general practice, presentation of the best examples with analysis of its success factors can help in informing them about valuable developments.
That mapping done in our project gave the basis for developing the following project results:
This guidebook on implementation of quality improvement in general practice intends to illustrate to you the scope of quality improvement in the context of general practice and introduce you to practical means of assessing and improving the quality of care where you work. There are diverse methods, tools and approaches to the QI processes in general practice, which results in multiplicity of obstacles that can be met on the way towards better quality of delivered care. You may wish to address a specific obstacle to quality improvement or to develop a new system of managing patients with a chronic condition. The guidebook is targeted at regular GPs looking to improve the quality of their practice using either an individual approach or a team based approach.