International Keynote

Assoc. Prof. Zalika Klemenc Ketis

Chair of the Department of Family Medicine  
University of Maribor Faculty of Medicine, Slovenia

Zalika Klemenc Ketiš is a family medicine physician employed at the Ljubljana Community Health care Centre, where she also heads the Institute for Research and Development of Primary Care (IRROZ). She is also an associate professor of family medicine at the Medical Faculty of the University of Maribor, where she is also the head of the Department of Family Medicine. From 2015 to 2021 she was the head of the research group at the Department of Family Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of Ljubljana. She is very internationally active, from 2018 to 2021 she was the President of the European Association for Quality and Safety in Family Medicine (EQuiP), since 2016 she is a member of the Executive Board of the European Association of Family Physicians (WONCA Europe). As an international expert in the field of family medicine and quality of work, she has participated in WHO and EU projects. She is an active researcher, mainly in the fields of quality and safety in family medicine, education, and new technologies.

Assessing the quality of primary care delivery

In 1966, Donabedian put forward a conceptual model that provided a framework for examining health care services and evaluating quality of health care. According to that model, quality of care can be evaluated based on three categories: structure, process, and outcome. Later, more frameworks were developed, but all are based on those three categories.

Delivery of primary care services is described as the processes that involve actions by the practitioners in the system, as well as the actions of the populations and patients, and manner by which health care services are delivered by the providers, actions taken and processes of care received by patients, families and communities.

In this presentation, key elements of the delivery of primary care (integration of patient care, interpersonal care, comprehensiveness of care, interprofessional relationship, and advocacy, and community action) will be presented. Also, linking constructs between the delivery of primary care services and the structure and outcomes of primary care (equity, effectiveness, efficiency, accessibility, appropriateness, and integration) will be explored. Various quality indicators for measuring the quality of delivery of primary care services will be presented. Evidence will be given for what describes high-quality of primary care delivery.