Background Healthcare patient safety investigations inappropriately focus on individual culpability and the target of recommendations is often on the behaviours of individuals, rather than addressing ...

Qualitative research can make a valuable contribution to the study of quality and safety in health care. Sound ways of appraising qualitative research are needed, but currently there are many ...

1 Department of Community and Family Medicine, Dartmouth Medical School, Hanover, NH, USA 2 Departments of Pediatrics and of Internal Medicine, Dartmouth Medical School, Hanover, NH, USA 3 Veterans ...

The concept of knowledge co-production is used in health services research to describe partnerships (which can involve researchers, practitioners, managers, commissioners or service users) with the ...

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 ...

Providing clinical care is above all a service; in that sense, the medical profession aspires to Aristotelian phronesis, or prudence—being ‘capable of action with regard to things that are good and ...

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 ...

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 ...

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

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 ...

While the body of evidence-based healthcare interventions grows, the ability of health systems to deliver these interventions effectively and efficiently lags behind. Quality improvement approaches, ...

Center for Organizational and Occupational Sciences, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland Correspondence to Dr Yvonne Pfeiffer, Center for Organizational and Occupational Sciences, ETH Zurich, Kreuzplatz 5 ...