I would like to share my experience of working with two very different healthcare systems. Canada's healthcare system is completely government funded with no privatisation at all. Also, the public health priorities are very very different in comparison to India. But if we specifically talk about issues hospitals are facing to improve their quality of services are very much similar to what Indian hospital industry is currently experiencing. For eg Waiting times, patient flow, admission and discharge practices, medication errors, Electronic health records, patient safety etc

With respect to the implementation of the Quality Improvement projects, the challenges are very much similar like conducting team meetings, communication between the team, manual tracking of the indicators, concept of PDSA cycles. The big difference between these two countries as per my observation is that countries like Canada (which mostly follows Europe model for providing quality care) have system in place to initiate and implement these quality improvement projects which our Indian healthcare system is lacking with. The hospitals themselves identify the areas on which they want to work upon for the next financial year and prioritise the work based upon the quality improvement plans which is a mandate for the hospitals to submit to their ministries. In addition, there is a well established system to execute these QI projects, track their improvements and the senior leadership involvement at every step. Also, we are not only involved in the clinical projects. Hospitals want to improve the quality overall so involve us in their corporate projects as well.

So I think rather than writing about QI initiatives which are very much similar across both India and Canada, it would be useful to discuss about the differences in the system and how in Canada they approach quality and therefore the QI projects. Because they have a systematic approach, it helps in better implementation of the projects and the whole hospital knows about it and runs in alignment with the overall objective.Will be glad to receive comments and viewpoints on this post .