Quality: What’s Love Got to Do With It?
Why It MattersQI tools are both necessary and insufficient to improve health and health care worldwide. We also need a much deeper understanding of what matters most to humans. “Ultimately, the secret of quality is love. . . If you have love, you can then work backward to monitor and improve the system.” — Avedis Donabedian, health systems research pioneerCourage. Trust. Equity. Love. These are IHI’s core values.Although courage, trust, and equity are not necessarily typical organizational values, love is the one that often surprises people the most. IHI undertook a months-long reevaluation of our values a few years ago. Led by staff members from across IHI, including our former CEO Derek Feeley, love was the value that raised the most questions during this process.Was it too sentimental? Too personal for a work environment? We kept coming back to the word again and again. We deliberately chose love, courage, equity, and trust because these are the values we want to guide how we act an