Medicine & Health

High-Quality Health Systems

Published April 7, 2020 Partnered Collections, Special Issues

High quality health care will be critical to attaining the Sustainable Development Goals in low- and middle income countries. However, little is known on levels of quality and its distribution within and between countries, how to best measure quality, or what interventions can meaningfully improve quality at scale. The Collection on High Quality Health Systems features a range of research papers on the measurement, improvement, and ethics of health system quality.

Image Credit: Naima Joseph

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Editorial
Measuring health system quality
Improving health system quality
Ethics and equity in health system quality
Additional Content

Editorial

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United Nations / Flickr

PLOS Medicine Health systems thinking: A new generation of research to improve healthcare quality
October 30, 2018 Hannah H. Leslie, Lisa R. Hirschhorn, Tanya Marchant, Svetlana V. Doubova, Oye Gureje, Margaret E. Kruk

Measuring health system quality

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10.1371/journal.pmed.1002990

PLOS Medicine Estimating the global impact of poor quality of care on maternal and neonatal outcomes in 81 low- and middle-income countries: A modeling study
December 18, 2019 Victoria Chou, Neff Walker, Mufaro Kanyangarara
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10.1371/journal.pmed.1002860

PLOS Medicine Care practices and neonatal survival in 52 neonatal intensive care units in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, India: A cross-sectional study
July 23, 2019 Claudia Hanson, Samiksha Singh, Karen Zamboni, Mukta Tyagi, Swecha Chamarty, Rajan Shukla, Joanna Schellenberg
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10.1371/journal.pone.0218662

PLOS ONE Facility management associated with improved primary health care outcomes in Ghana
July 2, 2019 Erlyn K. Macarayan, Hannah L. Ratcliffe, Easmon Otupiri, Lisa R. Hirschhorn, Kate Miller, Stuart R. Lipsitz, Atul A. Gawande, Asaf Bitton
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10.1371/journal.pone.0217547

PLOS ONE Comparing summary measures of quality of care for family planning in Haiti, Malawi, and Tanzania
June 7, 2019 Lindsay Mallick, Gheda Temsah, Wenjuan Wang
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DFIF/Flickr

PLOS ONE Determinants of continuum of care for maternal, newborn, and child health services in rural Khammouane, Lao PDR
April 23, 2019 Saki Sakuma, Junko Yasuoka, Khampheng Phongluxa, Masamine Jimba
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10.1371/journal.pone.0211265

PLOS ONE Quality of routine facility data for monitoring priority maternal and newborn indicators in DHIS2: A case study from Gombe State, Nigeria
January 25, 2019 Antoinette Alas Bhattacharya, Nasir Umar, Ahmed Audu, Habila Felix, Elizabeth Allen, Joanna R. M. Schellenberg, Tanya Marchant
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Harisankar s / Flickr

PLOS ONE The know-do gap in sick child care in Ethiopia
December 12, 2018 Anna Gage, Margaret Kruk, Tsinuel Girma, Ephrem Lemango
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Neil Moralee/Flickr

PLOS Medicine Patient-centered primary care and self-rated health in 6 Latin American and Caribbean countries: Analysis of a public opinion cross-sectional survey
October 9, 2018 Frederico Guanais, Svetlana V. Doubova, Hannah H. Leslie, Ricardo Perez-Cuevas, Ezequiel García-Elorrio, Margaret E. Kruk
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Elizabeth Allen et al

PLOS ONE Associations between increased intervention coverage for mothers and newborns and the number and quality of contacts between families and health workers: An analysis of cluster level repeat cross sectional survey data in Ethiopia
August 2, 2018 Elizabeth Allen, Joanna Schellenberg, Della Berhanu, Simon Cousens, Tanya Marchant
Image credit
Jennifer Pearson, US Air Force

PLOS Medicine Association between infrastructure and observed quality of care in 4 healthcare services: A cross-sectional study of 4,300 facilities in 8 countries
December 12, 2017 Hannah Leslie, Zeye Sun, Margaret Kruk
Image credit
Feed My Starving Children (FMSC), Flickr

PLOS Medicine Bridging the quality chasm in maternal, newborn, and child healthcare in low- and middle-income countries
December 12, 2017 Lars Åke Persson

Improving health system quality

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0225258

PLOS ONE Quality of Kangaroo Mother Care services in Ethiopia: Implications for policy and practice
November 22, 2019 Haftom Gebrehiwot Weldearegay ,Araya Abrha Medhanyie,Mulugeta Woldu Abrha,Lisanu Tadesse,Ephrem Tekle,Bereket Yakob,Tsinuel Girma,Catherine Arsenault
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10.1371/journal.pmed.1002943

PLOS Medicine Provision of postpartum care to women giving birth in health facilities in sub-Saharan Africa: A cross-sectional study using Demographic and Health Survey data from 33 countries
October 23, 2019 Lenka Benova, Onikepe Owolabi, Emma Radovich, Kerry Wong, David Macleod, Etienne Langlois, Oona Campbell
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10.1371/journal.pone.0222978

PLOS ONE Implementation of an international standardized set of outcome indicators in pregnancy and childbirth in Kenya: Utilizing mobile technology to collect patient-reported outcomes
October 16, 2019 Ishtar Al-Shammari, Lina Roa, Rachel Yorlets, Christina Akerman, Annelies Dekker, Thomas Kelley, Ramona Koech, Judy Mutuku, Robert Nyarango, Doriane Nzorubara, Nicole Spieker, Manasi Vaidya, John Meara, David Ljungman
Image credit
sumanley, Pixabay

PLOS Medicine High quality health systems in the SDG era: Country-specific priorities for improving quality of care
October 3, 2019 Gagan Thapa, Manoj Jhalani, Sebastián García-Saisó, Address Malata, Sanam Roder-DeWan, Hannah H. Leslie
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10.1371/journal.pone.0221919

PLOS ONE The effectiveness of the quality improvement collaborative strategy in low- and middle-income countries: A systematic review and meta-analysis
October 3, 2019 Ezequiel Garcia-Elorrio, Samantha Y. Rowe, Maria E. Teijeiro, Agustín Ciapponi, Alexander K. Rowe
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10.1371/journal.pmed.1002879

PLOS Medicine Expectations of healthcare quality: A cross-sectional study of internet users in 12 low- and middle-income countries
August 7, 2019 Sanam Roder-DeWan, Anna D. Gage, Lisa R. Hirschhorn, Nana A. Y. Twum-Danso, Jerker Liljestrand, Kwanele Asante-Shongwe, Viviana Rodríguez, Talhiya Yahya, Margaret E. Kruk
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Samantha Y. Rowe et al

PLOS ONE A systematic review of the effectiveness of strategies to improve health care provider performance in low- and middle-income countries: Methods and descriptive results
May 31, 2019 Samantha Y. Rowe, David H. Peters, Kathleen A. Holloway, John Chalker, Dennis Ross-Degnan, Alexander K. Rowe
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10.1371/journal.pone.0214922

PLOS ONE Categorizing and assessing comprehensive drivers of provider behavior for optimizing quality of health care
April 17, 2019 Elisabeth Engl, Steve Kretschmer, Mokshada Jain, Saransh Sharma, Ram Prasad, B. M. Ramesh, Mrunal Shetye, Seema Tandon, Sanjiv Kumar, Tisa Barrios Wilson, Sema K. Sgaier

Ethics and equity in health system quality

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10.1371/journal.pone.0196585

PLOS ONE What capacity exists to provide essential inpatient care to small and sick newborns in a high mortality urban setting? – A cross-sectional study in Nairobi City County, Kenya
April 27, 2018 Georgina A. V. Murphy, David Gathara, Nancy Abuya, Jacintah Mwachiro, Sam Ochola, Robert Ayisi, Mike English, on behalf of the Health Services that Deliver for Newborns Expert Group

Additional Content

Image credit
Naima Joseph, MD

Speaking of Medicine High-Quality Health Systems in the Sustainable Development Goal Era: A Special Collection | Speaking of Medicine
December 13, 2017 Margaret Kruk, Hannah Leslie, and Muhammad Ali Pate introduce the High-Quality Health Systems collection.