Doctors and healthcare researchers last week debated how to import the theories and methods of healthcare quality improvement into the developing world.

At the forum on quality improvement in health care in Bergen, Norway, speakers identified inadequate infrastructure, lack of local expertise and leadership, and language as the main barriers preventing the establishment of “first world standards of care” in developing countries.

Speakers focused on systems rather than individualised approaches to improving health care and treatment, an idea that is an essential part of the quality improvement movement.

“To ask individuals to make change is a bankrupt idea,” said Don Berwick, head of the US Institute for Healthcare Improvement and a plenary speaker at the forum. “This is the case in the North, but even more so in …