Could quality be cheaper?

Intuitively we believe that improving quality in our health services should lead to reduced waste and therefore save money. However, in practice this is often hard to prove and as a result there is little published evidence to demonstrate that improving quality does save money.

The Health Foundation aims to build this evidence base by encouraging all those involved in improvement initiatives to accurately measure costs and identify where savings are made.

This case study looks in detail at three improvement projects that received support from our Shine 2010 programme. They aimed to introduce innovations, redesign services, improve patient care and identify savings for their local health services.

We look at the evidence already gathered about whether improving quality saves money, and ask what these three examples can add to our knowledge. By exploring their journeys and the challenges they faced, we hope to build a clearer understanding of whether quality improvement can be a central component of cost reduction.

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• You can use the boxes below to look at the aspects of the case study that interest you, or download the full case study publication as a pdf or download the Word version.
• Find out more about the other Shine 2010 projects