HEALTHCARE QUALITY PAGE

BLOG DECEMBER 2025

It’s time to properly structure quality and safety in healthcare organizations

In many healthcare organizations, quality, patient safety, and related functions remain situated in different departments, each with its own accountability structure. These activities often function in organizational silos, sometimes competing for the time and attention of clinical groups, and often not working together as part of an integrated governance system.

Yet the links among these activities are extensive. The patient safety agenda has major implications for clinical audit, quality improvement, risk assessment and management, clinical effectiveness, and patient experience. Clinical audit is closely connected with evidence-based practice, incident analysis, thematic analysis, mortality review, risk assessment, regulatory compliance, and patient experience. Quality improvement relates to all of these functions. Patient experience also overlaps with most, if not all, of the components of quality and safety.

These activities need to work together under strong clinical leadership, with clear accountability to the chief executive through the chief medical officer or medical director. More important, all of these functions — not patient safety alone — require analysis of systems and the application of human factors engineering to support sustained improvement in patient care. That expertise should be available across all quality, safety, and related functions, rather than being confined to one part of the organization.