A new paper in the Journal of Global Health by Moïse Muzigaba and colleagues sheds some valuable insights on a multi-year, multi-country effort to improve health service quality through a network approach. Some of you will already be very familiar with the Network for Improving Quality of Care - QoC - for Maternal, Newborn, and Child Health
The paper can be found here: https://jogh.org/2025/jogh-15-04201
The project was a partnership between UN agencies, implementing partners, and governments in two South East Asian and eight African countries. This study “assessed the impact of the network over a five-year period, the results from impact analysis based on selected indicators and the challenges and limitations in collecting and interpreting such data are presented”.
The implementation approach comprises four components (take a look at figure 1 in the paper) – planning for implementation at the national level; support for implementation at the sub-national and facility level; measurement and monitoring of implementation and its impact and finally, establishing and maintaining learning systems.
The approach was foundational and inspirational for some of the work I was later involved in, with WHO colleagues, to develop a planning guide for developing quality health services https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240011632
The bottom line results of the study can be summed up as follows: "Identifying learning sites with common quality of care problems and developing and implementing fit-for-purpose and high impact quality improvement (QI) interventions will potentially drive impact better than a set of siloed and heterogenous QI initiatives."
It would be interesting to hear reflections and insights from HIFA members who have been involved in the network.
Jules
HIFA profile: Julie Storr has over a decade of experience working for WHO on the development, implementation and evaluation of global improvement programmes in the field of patient safety, quality and infection prevention and control, with a focus on behaviour change. Her current work spans two WHO units – quality Universal Health Coverage and Global Infection Prevention and Control (IPC). Her technical and leadership expertise was called on to support WHO’s Ebola response and recovery efforts in 2014/15, with a focus on national IPC policy development in Sierra Leone. She led on the development of the recently published evidence based WHO Guidelines on the Core Components of Infection Prevention and Control Programmes at the National and Acute Health Care Facility Level. She was previously President of the Infection Prevention Society of the UK and Ireland, Assistant Director at the English National Patient Safety Agency and Director of the seminal cleanyourhands campaign. Julie has authored a book (Perspectives and Perceptions of IPC – highly commended at the 2016 BMA Medical Book Awards), published widely in the academic literature and is peer reviewer of a range of academic journals including Implementation Science, and on the international advisory board of the Journal of Infection Prevention. She is currently studying for a doctorate in public health (health care leadership and management) at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore. She is a member of the HIFA Steering Group and HIFA Partnerships and Projects Working Group. https://www.hifa.org/support/members/julie-0 Email: julesstorr AT me.com