In healthcare, the idea of external evaluation took hold with quiet beginnings almost 100 years ago when Ernest Codman, a pioneering American surgeon hailing from Boston, Massachusetts, had the bright idea of suggesting that clinicians and hospitals follow patients and assess whether the outcomes of their treatments were realised.
Today, after decades of trial and error and a great deal of interest, we have many versions of external feedback provided to internal stakeholders in healthcare and elsewhere.
But how does external evaluation work in practice in health systems of 2021? Have we sufficiently defined what happens during external evaluation, made clear how it works and considered sufficiently deeply the purpose of external evaluation? Scholars, policymakers, clinicians, regulators, and accreditors have done this spasmodically and in a piecemeal fashion. Studies and commentaries are intermittently peppered throughout the literature.
Now, the ISQua External Evaluation Association (ISQua EEA) Accreditation Council have brought many ideas and scholarship together to develop a White Paper to develop a definitive guide to clarify how external evaluation works, its purpose, its constituent elements, how it operates as an intervention and what is likely to happen as it changes the way it contributes over time.
This White Paper will be of interest to those interested in ensuring high-quality services in healthcare and the role that an external assessment of those services can play in the ongoing improvement of care to patients
The White Paper may be accessed here: https://isqua.org/resources-blog/resources.html
