The NHS is committed to providing high quality care. Quality and safety criteria are set and monitored nationally, with every organization's performance assessed and made public.

‘The New NHS: Modern, Dependable’, the Labour government's first health policy White Paper (published in 1997), promised that the service ‘will have quality at its heart’. Eleven years later and coinciding with the 60th anniversary of the NHS in July 2008, the Next Stage Review's final report ‘High Quality Care for All’ defined quality from a patient's perspective as comprising: patient safety, patient experience and effectiveness of care.