About us.

In Argentina and in Latin America, efforts aimed at improving the quality and safety of medical care are still insufficient. Beyond the reach of the fairness, prioritization, infrastructure, and funding issues that affect each industry or organization, the truth is that Healthcare Quality and Patient Safety is not a priority, neither in the Argentine nor in the Latin American health agenda. Because of this, wastes are disposed of inefficiently, healthcare professionals feel discouraged, and patients are probably suffering damages that could have been prevented, and delays that could have been reduced.

Unfortunately, unlike other countries, there is scant evidence about these issues because we lack the information necessary to envisage the size of the problem. For this reason, we can only guess the impact based on data from other locations and assume that, possibly, in some aspects the impact on our region is even more profound.

Mutual collaboration and effective implementation programs are the only way to reverse this situation. This is why we develop educational and technical cooperation programs and research projects to create and spread experiences aimed at improving quality of care and patient safety.

• Research

We develop different research projects nationally and regionally. Our objective is to understand and adapt techniques and interventions to improve the quality of care in the region.

In this regard, our areas of work are: management to change professional attitudes; implementation of improved quality interventions at the level of the population; adaptation and validation of instruments aimed at assessing patients’ views on healthcare services; development of panels of indicators to monitor healthcare processes and to evaluate the quality of outpatient practices, among others. We also conduct systematic reviews related to patient safety and quality, and economic impact analysis of quality-of-care related interventions.

See ongoing research projects

• Training

Master’s Degree Course:

Since 1999 we have a Master’s Degree Course in Clinical Effectiveness in the School of Medicine of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA). Since 2014, the new curriculum allows students to choose between three areas of interest—one of them being “Clinical management and quality of care in health organizations”. This option offers training in management of patient-related processes; and in planning, designing, and guiding quality of care and patient safety projects (read more about the Master’s Degree).

Courses and programs:

Our programs, training sessions, workshops, and webinars focus on the following topics: improvement of patient safety and healthcare quality management; research on healthcare quality and patient safety; monitoring and evaluation; interventions aimed at improving quality of care; improvement of procedures using Six Sigma and Lean methodologies and external evaluation models (accreditation).

To develop these programs we rely on our own staff and specially hired experts from the region.

See available courses

• Technical Cooperation-Implementation

To put our own findings—and those of third parties—to practice, we develop technical cooperation projects with public and private organizations, both nationally and regionally.

These projects include developing an organizational culture based on patient safety; implementing patient safety programs; initiatives aimed at preventing adverse events; safe medication management; infection control; monitoring healthcare processes; implementing continuous improvement (both for national and international accreditation); baseline evaluations; interacting with international consulting groups specialized in accreditation; programs to assess the effectiveness of health care quality and of safety strategies and projects.