This paper was commissioned by The King’s Fund to inform the GP Inquiry panel. The views expressed are those of the authors and not of the panel.
Over the past 20 years there has been a growing awareness of the need to improve quality across health care and general practice, driven by a need to reduce inequalities in health care and the need to effectively translate evidence into practice and by the changing expectations of patients and carers. However, until now the activity to address this need has often been variable. This paper reviews approaches to quality improvement and their current usage in general practice, examines the barriers to adopting new quality improvement methods and the factors that promote it, and makes recommendations for action at multiple levels of the health system to nurture and support improvements in quality in general practice. The paper draws on published literature as well as the authors’ experience in training and coaching general practice teams in quality improvement. The views contained in this paper are those of the authors, and do not necessarily represent the view of the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement or the Department of Health.