Endocrine Abstracts

Achieving high quality medical care is challenging. Constant assessment is required to identify areas of best practice and deficits in care. The quality of healthcare is multifaceted as healthcare is a complex process. Benchmarking can be an effective measure to assess quality of healthcare. Clinical benchmarking is a systematic process in which current practice and care are compared to, and amended to attain, best practice and care. Benchmarking has the potential to drive improvements in clinical care and enhance outcomes, enable better targeting of limited resource and optimise efficiency and cost saving. A pre-requisite to benchmarking is the development of quality indicators. Although quality indicators are not a direct measure of quality of care, they serve as proxies to demonstrate whether excellence in care is achieved. When constructing quality indicators, the objective is to identify key parameters that are relevant, valid and can be operationalised to distinguish good from poor quality care. Quality indicators can be classified as structural, process and outcome quality, and can facilitate monitoring of care and development of health policy. The use of clinical benchmarking is variable in paediatric disciplines and it is underutilised in paediatric endocrinology. Using studies of care in children living with congenital adrenal hyperplasia and differences of sex development, this lecture will provide an overview of the emerging evidence and challenges for developing quality indicators and benchmarking in paediatric endocrinology.