Quality, risk management and patient safety: the challenge of effective integration.

Nowadays we observe the development of three waves of intervention and change within healthcare services: quality management, risk management and patient safety. The Patient Safety movement has been launched at international level as a consequence of the Institute of Medicine's report--To Err is Human, and today patient safety constitutes one basic dimension of health quality subjected to the direct intervention of supranational entities (WHO, EU) and Member States' Governments. The objective of this paper is to raise awareness about the value of quality improvement (QI) methodologies and tools to sustainable healthcare quality outcomes.