Problem Chronic kidney disease is increasingly recognised in the UK, leading to a greater demand for specialist services. Traditional means of meeting this demand rely on GP referral of patients to ...

Background Healthcare-associated infections are a problem for the Swedish healthcare system. In order to reduce the risk of acquiring healthcare-associated infections, the intensive-care unit attended ...

Method The objective of this study was to assess the impact of an augmented version of The Productive Ward: Releasing Time to Care on staff and patient outcomes. The design was a naturalistic ...

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 ...

Problem: Labelling of high-risk drug infusions and lines is a well-recognised safety strategy to prevent medication errors. Although hospital wards characterised by multiple high-risk drug infusions ...

Background The objective of this study was to test the data quality, test–retest reliability and hospital-level reliability of the Patient-Reported Incident in Hospital Instrument (PRIH-I). Methods 13 ...

The ‘Deaf Effect’ The term ‘Deaf Effect’ has its roots in management and information studies literature, being defined 15 as occurring ‘When a decision maker doesn't hear, ignores or overrules a ...

Objective: To understand factors influencing patients’ decisions to attend for outpatient follow up consultations for asthma and to explore patients’ attitudes to telephone and email consultations in ...

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 ...

Background Formal evaluations of programmes are an important source of learning about the challenges faced in improving quality in healthcare and how they can be addressed. The authors aimed to ...

Objective There is a growing focus on quality and safety in healthcare. Outcome indicators are increasingly used to compare hospital performance and to rank hospitals, but the reliability of ranking ...

Clear evidence for a weekend effect was first demonstrated by Bell and Redelmeier1 who examined 3.8 million emergency admissions between 1988 and 1997 in an acute care hospital in Ontario. They had ...