Measuring and reporting on quality of care and patient safety in Canada: focusing on what matters

Quality of Healthcare in Canada: A Chartbook is a comprehensive, useful reference that organizes the multiple measures it contains around a well-established framework. It documents Canada's performance relative to several comparator countries and over time on a large number of indicators of care quality. However, the chartbook does not identify where the gaps are in the measurement of quality of care and patient safety, and it is limited in its ability to represent the measurement required to monitor current and upcoming policy initiatives in the field of healthcare quality. Further, it fails to represent fully the perspective of the patient or to incorporate the progress made in measuring patient-centred quality of care. The authors propose four ways forward for strengthening the measurement of healthcare quality and patient safety in Canada: (1) the standardized collection of patient-reported outcome measures; (2) a focus on the standardized measurement of patient safety across the country at micro-, meso- and macro-levels; (3) the measurement of multiple morbidities and of the quality of care provided to patients with multiple chronic conditions; and (4) a design of measurement systems in ways that reflect the perspectives of patients and citizens