DFCM Annual Report 2017-2018

QUALITY AND INNOVATION
Advancing Family
Medicine Globally
Through Quality
and Innovation
The Department of Family and Community Medicine’s
(DFCM) Quality and Innovation team hosted its first
international conference on improving quality in primary care
in April of 2017, bringing together world-leading experts in
Toronto. Organizers say it is now time to start talking about
quality improvement and moving it forward globally.
“Primary health care quality improvement is still a nascent field.
In Canada, specifically, we are still very naïve about how we go
about improving primary health care in our immediate practice
environments,” says Dr. Philip Ellison, Vice-Chair in Quality
and Innovation and Fidani Chair, Improvement and Innovation.
“There are no systemic financial incentives to improve quality
in health care. In most businesses, when you improve quality,
you will grow your business and reduce cost whereas in health
care, because a lot of the funding is based on volume or block
funding agreements, there are not these same sorts of marketbased
incentives.”
Quality improvement in health care raised its profile in 1999-
2000 through two American reports from the Institute of
Medicine (IOM) which raised the alarm on the crippling state
of safety and quality in hospitals. The publications titled “To
Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System” and “Crossing
the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century”
shed light on harsh realities of the American health care
system. Patients were dying because of health care. Some were
dying because of illnesses contracted in hospital, medication
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