Primary Health Care Quality Improvement Patterns: A Systematic Review Study

Along with the expansion of health systems, the importance of primary health care as the basis of an efficient health system is more evident and the quality of the provided services at this level becomes more important. In this way, the present study attempts to collect patterns used to improve the quality of primary health care.

The present study is a systematic review. The advanced search was done in the Web of Science, Scopus, Embase, PubMed, Cochrane, SID, MagIran, IranDoc, and Google Scholar databases in title, abstracts and keywords fields. Inclusion criteria include a comprehensive attitude, focus on primary health services, English or Persian language, published between 2006 and 2018. Exclusion criteria include studies that focus outside of primary health care. The quality of the studies was evaluated using the JBI checklist. Two independent researchers conducted the task of selecting studies, extracting data and evaluating the quality of studies, and disagreement cases were resolved by the third researcher.

After screening and reviewing the criteria for the entry of 10095 studies, 11 studies were finally included. The quality of the four studies was evaluated average and the rest of the quality was high. Two studies have provided patterns for improving the quality of primary health care, three evaluated the effectiveness of quality improvement tools, and five presented conceptual frameworks.

A total of eight types of systems extracted to assess and improve the quality of primary health services. Studies on primary health care have been used at various levels of personal, professional, practical and national policy, and have developed models, tools and frameworks that each of them can be used separately or combined for different situations with regard to the limitations and facilities mentioned and improve health outcomes.