Evaluation of improvement initiatives in healthcare is essential to establishing whether interventions are effective and to understanding how and why they work in order to enable replication. Although ...

Improvement (defined broadly as purposive efforts to secure positive change) has become an increasingly important activity and field of inquiry within healthcare. This article offers an overview of ...

Background Diagnostic error incurs enormous human and economic costs. The dual-process model reasoning provides a framework for understanding the diagnostic process ...

Patients, clinicians and managers all want to be reassured that their healthcare organisation is safe. But there is no consensus about what we mean when we ask whether a healthcare organisation is ...

School of Information, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA Correspondence to Professor Michael D Cohen, School of Information, University of Michigan, 1085 South University Avenue, 312 ...

Objective To assess quality of care for children presenting with acute abdominal pain using validated indicators. Design Audit of care quality for acute abdominal pain according to 21 care quality ...

Introduction Quality improvement (QI) is aimed at improving care. Equity is one of the six domains of healthcare quality, as defined by the Institute of Medicine. If this domain is ignored, QI ...

Objective—To develop a practitioner led definition of a prescribing error for use in quantitative studies of their incidence. Design—Two stage Delphi technique ...

To date, improvement in health care has relied mainly on a “top down” programme by programme approach to service change and development. This has spawned a multitude of different and often impressive ...

Department for Quality Measurement and Patient Safety, Norwegian Knowledge Centre for the Health Services, Oslo, Norway Correspondence to Dr Oyvind A Bjertnaes, Department for Quality Measurement and ...

There is wide belief that organisational culture shapes many aspects of performance, including safety. Yet proof of this relationship in a medical context is hard to find. In contrast to human factors ...

1 School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Manchester, UK 2 School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester, UK Correspondence to: Dr D M Ashcroft Senior Clinical ...