Health care quality is a level of
value provided by any
health care resources as determined by some measurement. As with
quality in other fields, it is an assessment of whether something is good enough and whether it is suitable for its purpose. The goal of health care is to provide medical resources of high quality to all who need them; that is, to ensure good
quality of life, to
cure illnesses when possible, to extend
life expectancy, and so on. Researchers use many different quality measures to attempt to determine health care quality, including counts of a therapy's reduction or lessening of diseases identified by
medical diagnosis, a decrease in the number of
risk factors which people have following
preventive care, or a survey of
health indicators in a population who are accessing certain kinds of care.