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International Journal for Quality in Health Care 14:439-440 (2002)
© 2002 International Society for Quality in Health Care

Editorial

Quality improvement in the developing world

Helen L. Smits, Sheila Leatherman and Donald M. Berwick

Eduardo Mondlane University, Maputo, Mozambique
University of North Carolina, North Carolina, USA
Institute for Healthcare Improvement, Boston, MA, USA

The first 10% of the full text of this article appears below.

A Quality Improvement (QI) team in a small clinic assessed children’s compliance with a standard treatment plan for a common infectious disease. Compliance was poor. Studying why, the staff discovered that the bad taste of the medicine was a principal problem. Working with mothers, the QI team identified popular foods that could be used to conceal the taste, and they placed in the waiting area a poster showing how to use the foods to do it. In the next test cycle, compliance with the treatment protocol had risen from 48% to 70%.

The story is familiar—a successful quality improvement project—but the setting is not. The project team was not in a wealthy American health maintenance organization or a primary care practice in Sweden. In was in a remote African village, the disease was malaria, and the drug was chloroquine [1].

In conjunction with this . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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