Quality Assurance Policies and Indicators for Long-Term Care in the European Union, Country Report: Poland

Abstract:
The aim of this report is to bring together all the information concerning quality assurance in long-term care (LTC) in Poland. In doing so, we analyse a number of legal regulations and administrative actions in the health care and social sectors, review reports on quality control by the supervising institutions and look at the available statistics reflecting quality in LTC. A general assessment of the LTC quality system reveals a number of drawbacks. There are no well-elaborated LTC standards that are monitored in a systematic and comparable way. The responsibility for assessment falls under several public institutions and the legal regulations are spread across different acts covering the health care and social sectors. The standards for home-based LTC are not defined well enough or monitored in terms of the quality of the care provided. The lack of monitoring of quality in informal LTC also poses a huge problem.