Introduction Quality improvement (QI) efforts are critical to promoting health equity and mitigating disparities in healthcare outcomes. Equity-focused QI (EF-QI) interventions address the unique ...

Several public inquiries into healthcare failings in the UK have noted that employees of failing organizations attempt to raise concerns about shortcomings in care, often over a prolonged period of ...

Background: In 2004, The Australian Council for Safety and Quality in Health Care recognised that the lack of a comprehensive framework describing competencies for patient safety was a barrier to ...

The 1999 Institute of Medicine report raised public awareness of the frequency and cost of adverse drug events in medicine. In response, in November 2000 a coalition of healthcare purchasers announced ...

In hospitals, the nursing staff typically represent the largest single element of cost, and nursing is frequently treated as a cost centre rather than a core service line. Efforts to contain hospital ...

The goal of improving patient safety has led to a number of paradigms for directing improvement efforts. The main paradigms to date have focused on reducing injuries, reducing errors, or improving ...

In 2008, Donald Berwick and colleagues provided a framework for the delivery of high value care in the USA, the Triple Aim, that is centred around three overarching goals: improving the individual ...

Do we care if a quality improvement (QI) innovation is effective, if it is not sustained? This uncomfortable question is increasingly important as healthcare is judged (and reimbursed) on ‘quality’ ...

Effective improvement and research rely on sustained multidisciplinary collaboration, but few examples are available of centres with the broad range of disciplines and practical experience that are ...

Background Quality improvement (QI) efforts have become widespread in healthcare, however there is significant variability in their success. Differences in context are thought to be responsible for ...

In this issue of BMJ Quality & Safety , Meddings et al 1 report the evaluation of a national effort to reduce two well-known safety targets, central line-associated bloodstream infection (CLABSI) and ...

Background With the introduction of Computerised Physician Order Entry (CPOE) in routine hospital care, a great deal of effort has been put into refining Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS) to ...