HEALTHCARE QUALITY PAGE

The vacuum in national leadership on the quality of patient care in England has been recognized. In a similar national vacuum of leadership in quality in the US, the National Association for Healthcare Quality (NAHQ, pronounced ‘nay-Q’) has shown what a professional body, made up of people doing quality-related work in healthcare organizations and committed to advancing healthcare quality, can achieve.

 

NAHQ was established in 1976 to educate and empower healthcare professionals to reduce variation in care delivery and drive value through improved quality and safety outcomes. Fifty years on, NAHQ is the industry leader, demonstrating that quality and safety are essential to healthcare excellence.

 

NAHQ’s leaders observed that, for decades, the healthcare system misunderstood or neglected the true value of quality and safety, treating the subjects as required by regulatory compliance rather than as a strategic advantage to be leveraged and used. NAHQ also recognized the lack of consistent, standardized training in quality and safety for the workforce.

 

In 2016, NAHQ developed an expert-driven, peer-reviewed, experience-based and validated Healthcare Quality Competency Framework to define explicitly the discipline of quality and safety. Using the framework as the basis for workforce training, NAHQ carried out a Return on Investment for Quality (ROI-Q) study in 2025 with a sample of US healthcare organizations that had invested in staff training. The study showed that investing in the workforce to advance quality and safety produced impressive ROI-Q, including substantial financial savings, reductions in serious incidents and employee turnover, and improved staff engagement in quality and safety.

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For England, the lesson is clear: if national leadership for quality remains absent, the quality workforce itself needs a professional body with the authority, competency framework and collective voice to make quality and safety central to healthcare excellence.