Improving the quality of cardiovascular preventive care in general practice

textabstractIn this thesis we target cardiovascular preventive care from a continuous quality improvement point of view in a project called CARPE (CArdiovascular Risk reduction in Primary carE). We created a multifaceted intervention based on a ·quality cycle· and used outreach visitors for its implementation, since this approach has proven successful in modifying professional behavior. 13 In addressing prevention we considered Donebedian's model 14 to assess quality of care: i.e. we distinguish structure, process and outcome. Donabedian designed this well lawwn and very influential model in order to be able to judge quality of care. We considered practice organization and clinical performance as parts of structure and process and we also addressed the outcome of preventive care on quality of life