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.

In Lagos, Nigeria our research aims to understand the way in which quality improvement in the public and private sectors is influenced by health system context.

In Ethiopia, IDEAS uses novel qualitative and quantitative methods to understand how QI approaches can influence health worker behaviours to improve care and how they affect both the delivery and the utilisation of services by patients. We also partner with the UCL Institute for Global Health on a multi-country project designed to understand how the Quality of Care Network operates at country level. Working with the Ethiopian Public Health Institute (EPHI), IDEAS applies a country case study approach to study the national and local level experience of the network to improve maternal and newborn health outcomes in Ethiopia.