The lecture is devoted to the content and assessment of the quality of medical care in general and specialized otorhinolaryngological care in particular. The lecture provides the basic concepts of medical care in general, its main types and forms of provision. The authors define the concept of specialized otorhinolaryngological care from the viewpoint of regulatory documents of the Ministry of Healthcare of Russia and current regulatory documents, its role in the system of medical care of our country, providing the routing of the patients at all its stages. The lecture presents the approaches to assessing the quality of specialized otorhinolaryngological care. The authors determine the concept of mistake and defect, their main types and causes, their effect on the safety and efficacy of specialized otorhinolaryngological care. The work covers the legal aspects of assessment of provided otorhinolaryngological care quality, pointing out the important problem of the absence of a single approach to such assessment in otorhinolaryngology. The authors substantiate the necessity of original and multipurpose system of expert assessment of quality of provided otorhinolaryngological care based on automatic quality evaluation technology as a prototype. The next work will be devoted to its peculiarities as well as to the problems existing in clinical otorhinolaryngology.