A survey of board chairs of English hospitals shows greater attention to quality of care than among their US counterparts.

There is growing international interest in the role that hospital boards of directors play in improving the quality of health care. In England the National Health Service created a program to help boards become more effective at ensuring quality. We sought to evaluate how boards at English hospitals are engaged in quality, and we conducted the first national survey of the governance practices of the chairpersons of English hospitals. The survey was completed by 132 of 171 board chairs. We compared the results to those of a survey of the chairs of US hospital boards that we published in 2010. We found that English board chairs had more expertise in quality-of-care issues and spent a greater proportion of their time on quality of care than their US counterparts. At the same time, the association in England between hospital performance on quality metrics and board engagement in quality was generally not as substantial as was evident in our earlier US survey. English board chairs tend to greatly overestimate the quality performance of their hospitals, much as their US counterparts do. Our analysis suggests that there is room for improvement in both countries to bolster board expertise and focus on key quality metrics, and to hold managers accountable for the delivery of safe, effective health care.