The Danish Healthcare Quality Programme is a method to generate persistent quality development across the entire healthcare sector in Denmark. The Danish Healthcare Quality Programme provides for standards of good quality – and of methods to measure and control this quality.

The objectives of the Danish Healthcare Quality Programme are:

• To avoid errors causing loss of lives, quality of life and resources
• To ensure that knowledge achieved via research and experience is utilized in all branches of the healthcare sector
• To document work performed
• To achieve the same high quality across geographical boundaries and sectors
• To generate coherence in citizens’ pathways across sectors – e.g. in the transition from hospital to local healthcare
• To render quality within the healthcare sector more visible
• To avoid that all institutions must invent their own quality assurance system
• To strive towards excellence – all the time

During the next years, hospitals, organisations, etc. will be introducing the norms of good standard incorporated into the standards. The standards include measuring points to ensure process management.

IKAS and the Danish Healthcare Quality Programme deliver a web-based IT-system, known as TAK, containing all standards that support and facilitate the process from the time of receipt of standards to final accreditation. TAK is developed in collaboration with the users.

The Danish Healthcare Quality Assessment Programme aims at including all Danish publicly financed healthcare services and seeks to operate on a cross sectoral basis. The Programme is a result of a collaboration entered between central government and the regions, thereby covering the public healthcare sector in full. Also, municipalities, private hospitals, and pharmacies have signed agreements on being part of the Programme.

The Danish Healthcare Quality Programme aims at generating and combining the data already being collected today in the Danish healthcare sector. These data include, among others, the national quality databases, adverse events, the National Indicator Project and the National Patient Satisfaction Surveys.

The Danish Healthcare Quality Programme also reaches out internationally. This is why the accreditation standards must be approved by the international accreditation organisation ISQua, the International Society for Quality in Healthcare. In its capacity as an accreditation organisation, IKAS must be approved by ISQua as well.