Quality Health Care: Identifying and Meeting Customer Needs

Highlights the importance of responding to the individual needs of patients, from a personal and general viewpoint. The reforms to health care organization have provided one mechanism for reconciling both patients′ and the community′s need for quality services, but not necessarily the individual. Within a hospital, a philosophy centred on individual patient needs; “patient focused care” provides a way of making explicit quality choices for the individual as well as the community served. While patient focused care is open to many interpretations, argues that in quality terms it is an important milestone as is the first quality approach which makes explicit reference to the patient.