Institutionalising community engagement for quality of care: moving beyond the rhetoric

Key messages

• Comprehensive and appropriate community engagement is critical for quality improvement initiatives and improving health outcomes for communities

• Too frequently community engagement is poorly defined and inadequately documented, and efforts to engage communities are not integrated into existing health systems

• Experience from Ghana and Nepal shows the importance of generating and documenting evidence of impact as well as cost effectiveness to support institutionalisation of community engagement to improve health quality