WHY QUALITY ACTION?

Why is quality important?

HIV remains a major public health challenge in Europe and is an important cause of preventable mortality and morbidity. Ensuring HIV prevention activities are effective is crucial to reducing the incidence and impact of infection on individuals and communities, especially among the most vulnerable populations.

Approaches, interventions and methods for HIV prevention must not only be appropriate to the situation they address, they must be carried out at a high level of quality to maximise effectiveness. Structured quality improvement continuously seeks and makes use of opportunities to optimise implementation.

Why Quality Action?

Quality Action contributes to the implementation of the EU policy on HIV: ‘Combating HIV/AIDS in the European Union and neighbouring countries (2009 -2013)’. The overall objectives of this EU Communication are:

1. To reduce new HIV infections across all European countries by 2013;
2. To improve access to prevention treatment, care and support; and
3. To improve the quality of life of people living with, affected by or most vulnerable to HIV/AIDS in the European Union and neighbouring countries.

The EU Communication calls for EU and Member State policy responses that meet the challenges of prevention, focus on priority areas and most at risk populations and improve the knowledge base through better cooperation and knowledge transfer among stakeholders. The policy sets out that the current HIV epidemic and expected future trends are best addressed through:

1. Scaling up the implementation of prevention strategies that effectively target local realities and needs while working towards ensuring universal access to prevention, treatment, care and support;
2. Supporting an effective response to HIV/AIDS in priority regions, such as the most affected EU Member States, the Russian Federation and the most affected neighbouring countries; and
3. Developing means to reach and support the populations most at risk and most vulnerable to HIV/AIDS across Europe.

These principles guide the inclusion of prevention projects and programs to participate in the practical application of quality improvement tools as part of Quality Action.

Please visit the EU Health Portal to learn more about how the EU promotes HIV prevention and what kinds of EU policies have been put in place. An overview of activities and policies can also be found on the website of DG SANCO.

The countries highlighted in green are
participating in Quality Action

What is Quality Action?

Quality Action is the EU co-funded ‘Joint Action on Improving Quality in HIV Prevention’ involving 45 partner organisations from 26 Member States, which started on March 2013 and ran for three years.

Quality Action promotes practical tools and materials to maximise the quality of HIV prevention projects and programmes. Five practical quality improvement tools are ready, available and translated into a range of European languages. They use different methodologies, have different degrees of complexity and each suits particular applications.

Quality Action has developed a Tool Selection Guide, to help identify which of the five tools to use for different projects and programmes. More than 80 practical applications of the tools have been developed and translated into case studies. Quality Action has trained more than 400 quality improvement trainers and facilitators from 25 different European countries.

Quality Action has developed two key documents to gain policy support and create an enabling environment for quality improvement. The ‘Charter for Quality in HIV Prevention’ summarises quality principles, criteria and key activities to put quality improvement into practice and offer practitioners, experts, policy makers and all other stakeholders the opportunity to commit to improving their work in HIV prevention. The Policy Kit offers policy makers the rationale and concrete actions for integrating quality improvement into HIV prevention policies, strategies and action plans.

What is structured quality improvement?

Quality improvement recognises and documents what works well and why, builds on and multiplies successes. Quality Action offers a structured approach, evidence-based principles and criteria, practical tools and trained experts.

The approach is based on the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle, with stakeholder participation and self-reflection driving quality upwards. Quality improvement in turn identifies and documents quality standards. The main work of Quality Action was to integrate this approach into the existing conceptual and practical working processes of HIV prevention stakeholders in order to maximise uptake.

Coordination of Quality Action

From 2013-2016 Quality Action was co-funded by the European Commission as a Joint Action and coordinated by the German Federal Centre for Health Education (BZgA) in Cologne, Germany. Its three cross-cutting and five core work packages were led by governmental and non-governmental organisations based in Belgium, Sweden, Ireland, Germany and the UK.

Quality Action and IQhiv

The methodological concept behind Quality Action is based on the work of the IQhiv initiative, which was launched in 2009. IQhiv aims to:

1. Promote the routine inclusion of quality improvement practices into HIV prevention across Europe at the project, program and policy levels; and
2. Disseminate information on quality improvement practices that have been shown to enhance the effectiveness of HIV prevention at the project, program and policy levels.

Further information can be found on the IQhiv website.