Healthcare Quality Improvement
Strengthening Health Systems Through Higher Quality Care
Workers unload new Long-Lasting Insecticide-Treated Nets (LLIN) to combat the spread of malaria in Cambodia. The timely, efficient tracking, delivery and distribution of LLINs increased dramatically following a series of evaluations and proposals through various quality improvement programs. Photo: URC
Home > Signature Products > Healthcare Quality Improvement
High-quality health systems consistently deliver safe, effective, and reliable care that improves health outcomes. Quality is not a separate activity—it is an essential part of how health services are planned, managed, delivered, and continuously improved.
Healthcare quality is not achieved by access alone. Health systems must consistently deliver safe, effective, and responsive that responds to population health needs and improves health outcomes. Globally, unsafe and poor-quality care is a critical contributor to the top 10 causes of death and disability. In low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), poor quality care is estimated to cause between 5.7 million and 8.4 million deaths annually.
A global leader in improving healthcare quality, URC partners with business, governments, health leaders, institutions, and communities to strengthen healthcare quality across all levels of the system.
Our approach helps countries institutionalize quality improvement, strengthen governance, improve workforce performance, use data for decision-making, and create sustainable systems that continuously adapt and improve. By linking quality improvement methodologies, health systems strengthening, and community engagement, URC helps clients build trusted, resilient health systems capable of delivering measurable and lasting results.
Approach
URC’s Healthcare Quality Improvement (HCQI) approach applies a whole-system framework that embeds quality across national, district, facility, and community levels. Rather than focusing on isolated interventions, HCQI aligns leadership, management, measurement, learning, and stakeholder engagement to create sustainable improvement.
The approach begins with strengthening leadership and governance through national quality policies, accreditation systems, regulatory frameworks, and quality strategies. At the operational level, URC supports managers and healthcare workers with quality improvement methods, coaching, performance management, and workforce development.
Data and accountability are central to the model. Health systems are supported to collect and use meaningful metrics, build dashboards, use evidence for decision-making, and establish accountability mechanisms that drive action rather than reporting alone.
We address five core strategic areas for building and sustaining a quality health system:
Leadership and governance
Management of human, financial, and physical resources
Systems for measurement, accountability, and data use
Learning, adaptation and continuous improvement
Public and private sector institutions, and community stakeholder engagement
These five areas work together to strengthen quality across the health system. Leadership sets direction, management aligns people and resources, measurement identifies progress and gaps, learning helps teams adapt and scale what works, and engagement keeps services focused on the needs of the people they serve. Together, they turn shared goals into safer, higher-quality care.
URC also promotes continuous learning by helping organizations and institutions identify successful practices, scale proven interventions, and create continuous improvement cultures. Community engagement ensures that services remain responsive to patient needs and local priorities.
URC builds on country-defined goals and existing systems to support leaders, policymakers, and program managers to implement quality strategies and promote coordination and harmonization of proven tools and approaches that consistently yield high quality care across the health sector.
What differentiates URC is our ability to integrate quality assurance, quality planning, quality improvement, behavioral and organizational change, health systems strengthening, and stakeholder engagement into a single coordinated strategy. This creates lasting institutional capacity while enabling measurable improvements in service delivery, patient experience, and health outcomes.
Outcomes
By strengthening the systems that govern, deliver, measure, and improve care, URC creates sustainable improvements in health service quality.
URC Clients Can Expect:
Examples
For more than 30 years, URC led a global program that strengthened healthcare quality by supporting national quality strategies and improving services in areas including maternal and child health, HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, nutrition, and noncommunicable diseases across 45 countries.
Facility-Based Quality Improvement Programs: Established continuous quality improvement systems in thousands of health facilities, enabling teams to use routine data to identify service delivery gaps, test solutions, and improve patient outcomes.
National Quality Strategy Development: Supported ministries of health in developing and implementing national quality policies and governance structures that aligned quality standards across public and private health sectors.
Uganda: Standardized quality management and performance improvement across regional, district, facility, and community health systems. Using national structures, tools, and learning platforms, the program strengthened regional quality committees, district coaching, facility improvement teams, client feedback systems, and service-quality dashboards. Integrated services were improved across seven regions, reaching thousands of facilities and strengthening maternal, newborn, child health, malaria, HIV, nutrition, and integrated chronic care services.
Ghana: Instituted national quality management across28 Ministry of Health agencies. The program strengthened the Ministry’s Quality Management Unit, supported implementation of the National Healthcare Quality Strategy 2024–2030, and contributed to accreditation standards and monitoring tools. Across seven regions and 44 districts, it established quality management systems, supported 402 work improvement teams, and improved maternal, newborn, and child health, malaria prevention, anemia reduction, and community-level quality improvement.
Jordan: URC partnered with Jordan’s Ministry of Health to strengthen quality governance and institutionalize performance improvement. The program established quality structures at the central, health directorate, and facility levels, including Central Quality Councils, Health Directorate Quality Councils, and facility-based Quality Assurance and Patient Safety teams. These systems enabled 774 health care providers to implement 438 point-of-care quality improvement initiatives across primary care facilities and hospitals, sustaining improvements in reproductive, maternal, newborn, and child health services.
Philippines, URC supported the Ministry of Health, and communities to build a more self-reliant health system and improve tuberculosis, family planning, and maternal and child health services.
