Pathways to quality: A framework for cost-effective team quality improvement and multiprofessional audit

Process-analysis approaches to quality improvement are more cost-effective than many standards-based quality assurance approaches, and more useful to practitioners seeking to improve the quality of their team services. The paper describes a framework for analysing a patient's path through a service. It describes the use of the framework for multidisciplinary quality audit, for team development and for quality costing.