April 2005
Portuguese Association of General Practitioners
National Institute for Quality in Health
By Luis Pisco
The past two years and a half we lived a very tense political situation with our Ministry of Health. We had a 3 days strike and a total disagreement with the policy of the Ministry of Health.
We were lucky and the political situation improved a lot. We have now a new government and a new Minister much more interested in Primary Care. He announced that is priorities are elderly people, primary health care and patients on continuous and palliative care.
The major part of is advisers are people belonging to the GP Association and we hope that in the near future things will improve. There are new and exciting developments, and all the policies for Primary Care are in line with what we defend for a long time.
1. The Portuguese Quality Indicator Project (PQIP)
The Portuguese Institute for Quality in Health (IQS), and the Center for Performance Studies (CPS) from the USA, agrees to develop a Demonstration Project (DP) aiming at the introduction of the Quality Indicator Project, which may benefit all Portuguese public hospitals.
The IQS is committed to the development of a quality indicator system for hospitals in Portugal, which could be used in combination with other tools for continuous quality improvements such as the HQS/King’s Fund Hospital Organizational Accreditation Program.
CPS/QIP, under contract, provided the QIP tools and training to the first group of hospitals, which will be partially financed by the IQS/Ministry of Health.
Because the DP showed a positive impact in Portuguese hospitals, the IQS is now leading the implementation of a Development Project with the CPS/QIP at the national level with the participation of 24 General Hospitals and 2 Hospitals for Mental Health.
2. Use of the Europep instrument
The Portuguese Institute for Quality in Health (IQS), and the Center for Studies and Research in Health (CEIS) from the University of Coimbra, have done an evaluation of the patients satisfaction with Family Practice, using the Europep instrument but also some specific questions related with the Portuguese Health Centers.
We have data from all the Portuguese Health Centres, 357 at national level and we received 11 166 answers. We have a database with all the users of the Health Centres in two months and then we made a random sample in each Health Centre and the questionnaires were sent to the patient’s home.
Next May we are going to make a national Conference to present the results of this study and to publish a book with 400 pages about patient views to improve Health Care and all the information collected.
Link to article by Berta Nunes: Improving patient satisfaction and organisation of services in the health center of ALFÂNDEGA DA FÉ
3. National Accreditation System for Hospitals
The main objective of the IQS/HQS Partnership is to apply and evaluate the HQS model in Portuguese Hospitals in order to get a National Hospital Organizational Quality System accredited by King’s Fund Health Quality Service.
This collaboration contributes to the development of the Portuguese Quality Assurance System for Hospitals and to create an autonomous and national monitoring programme and certification of Organizational Quality for Hospitals based on the model developed by HQS but also a Hospital Quality Performance benchmarking programme at national and international level. At the moment we have in this project 23 Hospitals and we already have 8 Hospitals with full accreditation and 4 with provisional accreditation. We also already made training of local project managers, surveyors, and also training for medical audit and risk management.
4. MoniQuOr - Evaluations 2004
We made on the last months of 2004 a new self-evaluation with the MoniQuOr (Assessment and Monitoring Organisational Quality in the Health Centres) a tool for evaluation of the Health Centres Organisation and Management.
On a voluntary basis we had a response rate of 55% - 186 Health Centers. We are now giving personalized feed back to the participating Centers and organizing a national Conference to present the results but also to discuss the future of this national Project.
