Quality Lines
DEVELOPING QUALITY INDICATORS FOR OLDER ADULTS: TRANSFER FROM THE USA TO THE UK IS FEASIBLE
Quality indicators are increasingly being used to assess health care, yet good indicators are expensive to develop. Can existing quality indicators be transferred from the USA to the UK? Steel and colleagues took a set of quality indicators for the health care of older adults that had been developed at RAND in the USA, and asked an expert panel in England to score them for validity. The panel judged 100% of the indicators about treatment, continuity, and follow up as valid, and 86% of the indicators overall as valid.
The 102 indicators judged as valid for use in England cover 16 clinical areas and so can be used to assess quality for several conditions simultaneously. They are designed for use in interview surveys, and so will avoid some of the problems with extracting data from clinical records. Patients are an underused source of information about quality of health care, and have the advantage that they can also provide contextual information such as health status and social and financial background. See p …
