Quantifying Quality in Primary Care

As part of Clinical Governance, Primary Care needs to be able to demonstrate the provision of quality care. In addition, the public quite rightly calls for greater transparency in Primary Care and more information about the quality of care provided by General Practitioners and their surgeries. Most of us would recognise good or bad practice if we saw it, but how do we quantify the quality of practice either for purposes of comparison with others, or as a baseline for future change?

Peter Graves sets out to do just this. He divides the areas of Primary Care to be assessed into three, namely, "the patients’ experience" (e.g. access to healthcare and buildings etc.), "patient management and treatment", and "practice management policies, staff and education." The book then works through the key areas of importance under these headings and in each case, comes up with a comprehensive checklist that individual practitioners or, preferably, practices, can use to assess their current status.

The beauty of this book is its simplicity. Almost everything that Graves lists and quantifies will be well known and well recognised by GPs and Practice Managers. However, the layout of the book allows a comprehensive assessment of a Practice’s service provision to be produced quickly and efficiently. This should then lead the Practice to examine those areas in need of attention in order to bring them up to a reasonable standard.

I believe that there is something in this book for everyone, as we all can all find areas of our work that could be improved. For example, I found the section on risk management and critical event monitoring of particular relevance to my own Practice. This is a book for all GPs and Practice Managers, who could use it to find ways of improving their service provision as well as ways of improving both patient satisfaction and staff development.

Publisher:	Radcliffe Medical Press
	ISBN: 1-85775-599-5

Price:	£24.95

Reviewer:	Dr Adrian Boonin

Month of review:	November 2002