Healthcare Quality

Alberta Health Services (AHS) is the single health authority in Canada (Alberta Health Services,

2015), covering a population size of around 4.1 million in Alberta province. AHS delivers care

through 400 facilities that include hospitals, clinics, aged care homes and others. Over 117,000

employees, including 7400 physicians are working for Alberta Health Services. For her 5 year

plan from 2010 to 2015, AHS identified 4 clinically focussed areas together with initiatives and

indicators for Quality Improvement (Alberta Health Services, 2012). The 4 areas are (a) To be

healthy and staying healthy (b) To strengthen primary care (c) To improve access and reduce

waiting time and (d) To provide more options for continuing care. These four areas form the

basis for programs that support and Quality Improvement efforts in AHS overall.

As AHS is a huge conglomerate, for the purpose of specifically understanding AHS's Quality

Improvement activities, this report will be focussing on the Quality Improvement Framework of

AHS for her Continuing Care Services (AHCCS), targeted for the aging population.

The AHCCS focus on home living, supportive living and facility living for the elderly (Pelton,

2014). With an ageing population, AHCCS play a critical role to support independence and high

quality of life for the elderly. As such services become more essential and prevalent in current

society, there became a need to establish a balanced clinical business structure, develop right

information management systems and audit critical processes to monitor services and enable

high quality of care for patients (Harbidge, 2014). Hence, AHCC launched a Continuing Care

Quality Management Framework to help identify, categorize and prioritize issues for

improvement that impact quality of care and service within AHCCS. Below is a snapshot of

AHCCS.