Quality of care is the degree to which health services for individuals and populations increase the likelihood of desired health outcomes and are consistent with current professional knowledge. It is conventionally analysed along several dimensions: safety, effectiveness, patient-centredness, timeliness, efficiency,…
Quality of care is the degree to which health services for individuals and populations increase the likelihood of desired health outcomes and are consistent with current professional knowledge. It is conventionally analysed along several dimensions: safety, effectiveness, patient-centredness, timeliness, efficiency, and equity. A foundational analytic framework distinguishes structure (the facilities, staffing, and resources available), process (the actions taken in giving and receiving care), and outcome (the resulting effects on health status), allowing care to be measured and improved at each level. Quality of care is assessed through clinical audit, patient-reported experience and outcome measures, adverse-event monitoring, and benchmarking against evidence-based standards. The research in this area spans long-term and aged-care settings, end-of-life and dementia care, nursing workforce factors such as turnover and skill mix, home-care support tools, maternal and women's health services, and care delivery for chronic conditions including type-2 diabetes, with several studies adopting phenomenological and qualitative methods to capture patient and provider experience. Improving quality of care depends on aligning organisational structures, evidence-based clinical processes, workforce capacity, and continuous measurement, because variation in any of these domains translates directly into differences in safety, satisfaction, and outcomes. The journal publishes peer-reviewed research examining the determinants, measurement, and improvement of care quality across diverse populations and health systems.
12 peer-reviewed articles, ranked by relevance. Each links to its DOI.
The 12 articles above have been cited 16 times in the scholarly literature. Citation data via OpenAlex and Crossref, updated Jun 2026.
A sample of recent works citing this journal's research on Quality of Care, linking to each citing work.