Understanding quality improvement

QI is a part of several Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s investments in low-income settings, including in Nigeria, Ethiopia and India. But little is yet known about how QI works through, for example, leadership, quality of teamwork, supportive supervision or organisational culture.

IDEAS uses novel qualitative and quantitative approaches in Ethiopia to understand how QI approaches can influence health worker behaviours to improve care and how they affect both the delivery of services and the utilisation of services by patients. To do this we interview health care providers participating in a quality improvement intervention.

One multi-country initiative supporting understanding quality improvement is the Quality of Care Network research (QCN). Working with the Ethiopian Public Health Institute (EPHI), IDEAS aims to include the experience of Ethiopia in this research  by applying a country case study approach to study the national and local level experience of the network.

In Lagos, Nigeria our research aims to understand the processes put in place for quality improvement in the public and private sector and in primary and secondary level facilities.