Collaborative improvement can produce significant, sustained gains in compliance with standards and outcomes in less-developed settings and merits wider application as a strategy for health systems strengthening.

BackgroundUganda is working to increase voluntary medical male circumcision (VMMC) to prevent HIV infection. To support VMMC quality improvement, this study compared three methods of disseminating information to facilities on how to improve VMMC quality: M—providing a written manual; MH—providing the manual plus a handover meeting in which clinicians shared advice on implementing key changes and participated in group discussion; and MHC—manual, handover meeting, and three site visits to the facility in which a coach provided individualized guidance and mentoring on improvement. We determined the different effects these had on compliance with indicators of quality of care.MethodsThis controlled pre-post intervention study randomized health facility groups to receive M, MH, or MHC. Observations of VMMCs performance determined compliance with quality indicators. Intervention costs per patient receiving VMMC were used in a decision-tree cost-effectiveness model to calculate the incremental cost per additional patient treated to compliance with indicators of informed consent, history taking, anesthesia administration, and post-operative instructions.ResultsThe most intensive method (MHC) cost $28.83 per patient and produced the biggest gains in history taking (35% improvement), anesthesia administration (20% improvement), and post-operative instructions (37% improvement). The least intensive method (M; $1.13 per patient) was most efficient because it produced small gains for a very low cost. The handover meeting (MH) was the most expensive among the three interventions but did not have a corresponding positive effect on quality.ConclusionHealth workers in facilities that received the VMMC improvement manual and participated in the handover meeting and coaching visits showed more improvement in VMMC quality indicators than those in the other two intervention groups. Providing the manual alone cost the least but was also the least effective in achieving improvements. The MHC intervention is recommended for broader implementation to improve VMMC quality in Uganda.

No abstract

No abstract

There is little evidence to direct health systems toward providing efficient interventions to address medical errors, defined as an unintended act of omission or commission or one not executed as intended that may or may not cause harm to the patient but does not achieve its intended outcome. We believe that lack of guidance on what is the most efficient way to reduce medical errors and improve the quality of health-care limits the scale-up of health system improvement interventions. Challenges to economic evaluation of these interventions include defining and implementing improvement interventions in different settings with high fidelity, capturing all of the positive and negative effects of the intervention, using process measures of effectiveness rather than health outcomes, and determining the full cost of the intervention and all economic consequences of its effects. However, health system improvement interventions should be treated similarly to individual medical interventions and undergo rigorous economic evaluation to provide actionable evidence to guide policy-makers in decisions of resource allocation for improvement activities among other competing demands for health-care resources.