The Donabedian Model

The Donabedian model is a conceptual model that provides a framework for examining health services and evaluating quality of health care. According to the model, information about quality of care can be drawn from three categories: “structure,” “process,” and “outcomes." Structure describes the context in which care is delivered, including hospital buildings, staff, financing, and equipment. Process denotes the transactions between patients and providers throughout the delivery of healthcare. Finally, outcomes refer to the effects of healthcare on the health status of patients and populations.Avedis Donabedian, a physician and health services researcher at the University of Michigan, developed the original model in 1966. While there are other quality of care frameworks, including the World Health Organization (WHO)-Recommended Quality of Care Framework and the Bamako Initiative, the Donabedian Model continues to be the dominant paradigm for assessing the quality of health care.

The model is most often represented by a chain of three boxes containing structure, process, and outcome connected by unidirectional arrows in that order. These boxes represent three types of information that may be collected in order to draw inferences about quality of care in a given system.

Structure includes all of the factors that affect the context in which care is delivered. This includes the physical facility, equipment, and human resources, as well as organizational characteristics such as staff training and payment methods. These factors control how providers and patients in a healthcare system act and are measures of the average quality of care within a facility or system. Structure is often easy to observe and measure and it may be the upstream cause of problems identified in process.

Process is the sum of all actions that make up healthcare. These commonly include diagnosis, treatment, preventive care, and patient education but may be expanded to include actions taken by the patients or their families. Processes can be further classified as technical processes, how care is delivered, or interpersonal processes, which all encompass the manner in which care is delivered. According to Donabedian, the measurement of process is nearly equivalent to the measurement of quality of care because process contains all acts of healthcare delivery. Information about process can be obtained from medical records, interviews with patients and practitioners, or direct observations of healthcare visits.

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