High Performing Healthcare Systems: Delivering Quality by Design. Toronto: Longwoods Publishing.

Longwoods has just launched the book "Systems" -- full title is High Performing Healthcare Systems: Delivering Quality by Design. It has its own blog, See: http://qualitybydesign.blogspot.com/ Here is part of Adalsteinn Brown's Foreword to the Book

Citation Information Brown, A. 2008. "Foreword." High Performing Healthcare Systems: Delivering Quality by Design. 9-10. Toronto: Longwoods Publishing.

Quality remains one of the great trade-offs in Canada's healthcare system. Every person working in the system agrees with the importance of quality, and many make it an explicit part of their personal and professional missions. Today, for example, when confronted by clear evidence of poor quality in their own practices and organizations, clinicians and administrators rarely question the validity of the information and they respond quickly to solve the problems identified. At the same time, however, most clinicians and administrators believe that large-scale improvement is unaffordable. Although quality continues to rise in importance, and nearly every study published identifies room for improvement, something stops us from achieving the high quality we desire. The work of G. Ross Baker - who led the Quality by Design initiative and, with Peter Norton, the landmark study on patient safety in Canada - lays out the challenge clearly. Every day in Canada's healthcare system preventable errors arise in hospitals, long-term care facilities and physicians' offices. These errors lead to extra costs, poor health and, in many cases, avoidable deaths. Yet the pursuit of safety and quality remains the something extra that many of the people working in our system can follow up on only at the end of a busy day. . . . .