To compare the quality of health care in U.K and Saudi Arabia Essay

To compare the quality of health care in U.K and Saudi Arabia - Essay Example is that it has to ensure that EU citizens obtain equal treatment in a host State. Thus while in case of U.K., one must both refer to the guidelines of WHO as well as E.U., Saudi Arabia needs to follow the guidelines of WHO only. In some countries health care for their respective citizens are regulated statutorily and some others it is only voluntary. Thus before going into the prevailing conditions in U.K. and Saudi Arabia, guidelines of the WHO and the E.U. must be examined. Standards of quality of general health care must be seen before going into the disease-specific health care quality standards. Some definitions relating to quality of health care need to be mentioned. They represent performance indicators or are used to describe performance measurement of health care industry. Rather than quality indicators, financial indicators have only played so far crucial role to describe performance. Financial indicators such as length of stay, average cost per discharge are no longer sufficient to understand quality of health care delivery of an organisation. In fact, Florence Nightingale set the tone for tracking healthcare outcomes. Later Earnest A. Codman, a surgeon from Boston, in early 1900s opined that physicians instead of just measuring what they did, should track results of their performance over a period. His thinking was ahead of his time and he called it the â€Å"end-result idea† saying that there should be some feedback system on what happened to the patients one year after receiving their treatment, though it was not welcomed by the profession and his colleagues at Massachusetts General Hospital criticised him for his outlandish idea.1 In his two volume classic Explorations in Quality Assessment and Monitoring (1980,1982), Donabedian, another physician proposed three key issues in the health care delivery. They are Structures, Processes and Outcomes. Structures are the tools, resources and organisational components. Processes are