The Fourth Dimension WHO Regional Office for Europe

Quality of care and public health are interlinked in many ways, most importantly in terms of how efficiency, effectiveness, efficacy, equity and person centredness have a central role in both. Health care is a significant aspect of public health and improving the quality of care has a profound impact on population health. Policy makers can adopt quality improvement methods for public health, whereas quality of care can expand outside the facility walls. On the fourth episode of The Fourt...

Technology and digital tools have been shaping health care and the health sector in an exponential rate during the last few decades. Even more so they have shifted the perception of what health care can be. As with many other aspects in public health and health care the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated this process and placed the critical role of digital health in the limelight, however, disparities in digital transformation still do exist. In the third episode of The Fourth Dimension,w...

The second episode of The Fourth Dimension looks into aspects of quality of care at the level of health systems and health sector. This episode’s guest Dr Natasha Azzopardi-Muscat, Director of the Division of Country Health Polices and Systems at WHO Regional Office for Europe, sheds some light on how quality of care and patient safety can be found and improved across the whole spectrum of health care services - from hospital care to primary care and from rehabilitation services to nursing ho...

The concept of quality of care in health policy has been receiving increased attention over the last couple of decades. The literature on quality of care has increased three-fold since the 1990s. Most recently, quality of care is mentioned in the context of the sustainable development goals. Despite this universal acceptance of its importance, however, there is not a common understanding of what quality of care actually is and what it entails, let alone what needs to be done...