International collaboration: harnessing differences to meet common needs in improving quality of care.

A growing number of countries worldwide are recognising a common need to build systemic capacity for safeguarding and improving quality of health care. Each country has a unique set of priorities and dynamics driving the speed and the substance of the quality agenda, constrained by the reality of the availability and distribution of resources. While acknowledging the considerable variation in context between countries, it is imperative to explore the role for, and potential of, cross-national collaboration to advance our common goals regarding improved performance in health care quality. Often the conventional basis for collaboration is a perception of similar need and/or convergent initiatives. As useful as such collaboration may be, building a partnership on common needs but different initiatives may be more useful. It could build on the complementarity of experience and expertise, as well as the commonalties. Divergent legacies and orientations may point to the richest areas for learning through cross-fertilisation to facilitate transfer of insights and expertise. One example of binational collaboration, building on both common challenges and different solutions, is the emerging repertoire of partnerships between the USA and UK in health care quality. These two countries, with stark differences in their health care systems, easily recognise their commonality of need as quality becomes a prominent focus of national health policy. Collaboration between the UK and the USA derives from the understanding that there are significant areas of convergence and divergence. In both these countries, as well as a growing number of others worldwide, the …