ArticleJournal of medical ethics2020
What does 'quality' add? Towards an ethics of healthcare improvement.
Article in Journal of medical ethics, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- The use of telehealth as a strategy to provide occupational therapy services in South Africa.Work (Reading, Mass.) · 2026Article
- "We Do Not Seem to Have Geriatric Wards": A Qualitative Analysis of Gaps in Healthcare Access Among Older Patients in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.Health science reports · 2025Article
- Moral Stress and Moral Distress: Confronting Challenges in Healthcare Systems under Pressure.The American journal of bioethics : AJOB · 2024Article
- Ethical Challenges in Oral Healthcare Services Provided by Non-Governmental Organizations for Refugees in Germany.Journal of bioethical inquiry · 2024Article
- How is return on investment from quality improvement programmes conceptualised by mental healthcare leaders and why: a qualitative study.BMC health services research · 2023Review
- Bioethical Implications of Vulnerability and Politics for Healthcare in Ethiopia and The Ways Forward.Journal of bioethical inquiry · 2022Article
- Aesthetics for everyday quality: one way to enrich healthcare improvement debates.Medical humanities · 2022Article
- Protecting Practitioners in Stressed Systems: Translational Bioethics and the COVID-19 Pandemic.Perspectives in biology and medicine · 2022Article
- Ethical considerations in quality improvement: key questions and a practical guide.BMJ open quality · 2021Article
- Pushing poverty off limits: quality improvement and the architecture of healthcare values.BMC medical ethics · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
In this paper, we argue that there are important ethical questions about healthcare improvement which are underexplored. We start by drawing on two existing literatures: first, the prevailing, primarily governance-oriented, application of ethics to healthcare 'quality improvement' (QI), and second, the application of QI to healthcare ethics. We show that these are insufficient for ethical analysis of healthcare improvement. In pursuit of a broader agenda for an ethics of healthcare improvement, we note that QI and ethics can, in some respects, be treated as closely related concerns and not simply as externally related agendas. To support our argument, we explore the gap between 'quality' and 'ethics' discourses and ask about the possible differences between 'good quality healthcare' and 'good healthcare'. We suggest that the word 'quality' both adds to and subtracts from the idea of 'good healthcare', and in particular that the technicist inflection of quality discourses needs to be set in the context of broader conceptualisations of healthcare improvement. We introduce the distinction between quality as a measurable property and quality as an evaluative judgement, suggesting that a core, but neglected, question for an ethics of healthcare improvement is striking the balance between these two conceptions of quality.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.