To date, relatively little evidence has been published as to what represents an effective and efficient way to improve quality of care and safety in hospitals. This vacuum in the research means there is a significant opportunity to design quality of care and safety interventions in collaboration with the relevant stakeholders, which address the relevant organisational and individual factors in a hospital setting. The aim of the present project will be; to benchmark the organisational and individual factors that impact on quality of care and patient safety, and design bottom-up interventions that both increase quality of care and physician well being.
In specific the project has the following objectives:
(1) To profile the specific factors of hospital-organisational culture that increase burnout among physicians, and therefore decrease quality of care,
(2) To monitor burnout and its associations to quality of hospital care among physicians,
(3) To identify appropriate bottom-up solutions to the problems of organisational culture and physician burnout, and its impact upon patient safety and quality of care, and
(4) To develop a network for hospital managers and associated stakeholders for the communication of interventions aimed improving quality of care in hospitals.

The work plan of the proposed project will consists of 3 phases: The first phase will be a preparatory one where the foundations for the following phases in terms of organisational and informational background will be outlined The second phase will assess the organisational culture, burnout and quality of care. A multi-centre survey will be conducted in physicians and patients from selected hospital-sites from South and SE Europe. This third phase will address how to improving quality of care using action research. The phase will use action research to involve health professionals and members of management boards in each hospital site to develop their own interventions for improving quality of care.