OECD Reviews of Health Care Quality: Italy 2014
Raising Standards
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This report reviews the quality of health care in Italy, seeks to highlight best practices, and provides a series of targeted assessments and recommendations for further improvements to quality of care. Italy’s indicators of health system outcomes, quality and efficiency are uniformly impressive. Life expectancy is the fifth highest in the OECD. Avoidable admission rates are amongst the very best in the OECD, and case-fatality after stroke or heart attack are also well below OECD averages. These figures, however, mask profound regional differences. Five times as many children in Sicily are admitted to hospital with an asthma attack than in Tuscany, for example. Despite this, quality improvement and service redesign have taken a back-seat as the fiscal crisis has hit. Fiscal consolidation has become an over-riding priority, even as health needs rapidly evolve. Italy must urgently prioritise quality of its health care services alongside fiscal sustainability. Regional differences must be lessened, in part by giving central authorities a greater role in supporting regional monitoring of local performance. Proactive, coordinated care for people with complex needs must be delivered by a strengthened primary care sector. Fundamental to each of these steps will be ensuring that the knowledge and skills of the health care workforce are best matched to needs.
Also available in: Italian
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Measuring and improving quality in Italy's regionalised health system
Whilst it cannot be said that any one region delivers consistently “poor” health care, it appears that some regions struggle to provide the same quality as others. Italy has established a number of mechanisms to try and ensure an evenness of approach to quality measurement and improvement. These include activities to ensure dialogue between national and regional authorities as well as professionally led initiatives to measure quality consistently. While it would be unrealistic and undesirable to seek complete homogeneity in how regional health systems are configured, more can be done to achieve a more even approach to quality measurement and improvement across R and AP. Key priorities are to develop a more consistent approach to using information to manage performance and strengthen local accountability. Ensuring that regional resource allocation has a focus on quality, and is linked to incentives for quality improvement, will also be important. Actions that strengthen the regional approach to health care governance and delivery in Italy are also needed. Developing the responsibilities and capacities of the national authorities whose role is to support the R and AP should continue. Reframing governance as a whole such that quality improvement is emphasised as much as financial control is also necessary.
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