Quality and Safety is the chief priority of the LHS. Lombardy guarantees high-quality health services and attracts a substantial number of patients from other parts of the country.

The LHS is an accredited system and the regional Government is responsible for organising and managing the regional accreditation process, and for granting authorisation for delivering healthcare services based on quality standards for accreditation (structural, technological and organisational).

Both public and private hospitals are subject to the same accreditation pathways and control systems. Since the late 1990’s, the regional Government has established financial incentives for hospitals that have developed quality improvement projects and, in the 2000’s, regional programmes were launched to support quality improvement in all healthcare facilities of the region. With the support of Joint Commission International (a world-leading company in accrediting healthcare organisations), the Region has developed quality evaluation systems for all its regional healthcare organisations, in order to enable comparisons between different healthcare organisations, to promote competition and to encourage quality improvements. The programme has demonstrated generally high levels of compliance with quality standards and improvement in all hospitals. 

A network of “clinical risk managers” is active in each hospital in the region, in order to ensure patient safety and to prevent risks.

The contents of this page are available, in the attached files, in Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian and Spanish.