Home visiting outcomes and quality of life measures.

Public Health agencies are faced with the task of self-evaluation. For years, they have evaluated themselves solely through utilization as demonstrated by the numbers of patients that they have served. A new thrust is to change the methods of evaluation by devising and implementing a quality assurance (QA) system. Traditional QA systems focus on acutely ill patients and are based on the medical model. In contrast, public health focuses on well or chronically ill patients with services that involve mostly palliative treatment, disease prevention, and/or health promotion. The criteria used by hospitals do not apply. Thus, public health agencies are forced to review their standards and develop criteria applicable to public health. This re-examination of public health can stimulate new ways of viewing old programs and therefore, elicit information that has never been gathered before.