"Political and technical barriers to improving quality of health care"

With the currently renewed emphasis on universal health coverage, the study by Margaret Kruk and colleagues.
in The Lancet is a timely reminder of the need to examine inadequacies in both access to and quality of health care.
Their key finding that poor quality of health care is a major driver of excess mortality in low-income and middle-income countries (LMIC) will not surprise those working in such settings.3
However, the authors' quantitative comparison indicating that improvements in the quality of health services would have a greater overall effect on mortality than expansion of service coverage (without attention to quality) provides new evidence to inform the resource allocation strategies of health policy makers and funding agencies. Indeed, excess mortality is only one of many adverse public health effects of low-quality health care.