Health Affairs Blog: Three More Billboards On The Long Road To Global Quality Health Care
Thomas J. Bollyky, director of global health at the Council on Foreign Relations; Krycia Cowling, researcher at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington; and Diana Schoder, research associate at the Council on Foreign Relations, highlight three reports released this year (by the WHO, the World Bank, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in July; by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in August; and by the Lancet Global Health Commission on High Quality Systems in the SDG Era in September) on quality health care. The authors write, “[T]here is a fair amount of consensus within the global health community regarding the urgent need for improved quality of care in low- and middle-income nations and on the substance of what that quality care should entail. That consensus in these reports may also reflect, however, a shared reluctance to engage in this context in a hard-nosed assessment of the reasons why poor quality of care remains so widespread or to assign responsibility and accountability to specific actors for overcoming those obstacles” (10/15).