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 ...

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 ...

Abstract 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 ...

The semi-literate quotation in the title comes from a note attached to a bomb thrown into Cotton Mather’s house in Boston, Massachusetts on 14 November 1721 because of Mather’s public advocacy of the ...

Within healthcare services worldwide, there is a continual emphasis on innovation, including the development, evaluation and improvement of new and existing healthcare interventions and services to ...

Healthcare workers could learn much from the engineering and civil aviation industries about safety management. The medical community is becoming more open to learning safety lessons from other ...

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 ...

Results UK doctors were more likely to have developed practice guidelines (82.8% UK vs 49.6% US, p<0.001) and to have taken part in a formal medical error-reduction programme (70.9% UK vs 55.7% US, ...

CDS-Dx work The report by Sibbald et al published in this issue of BMJ Quality & Safety adds to the growing evidence that decision support can improve the diagnostic process. 4 This study was ...

Background: The potential severity of wrong patient/procedure/site of surgery and the view that these events are avoidable, make the prevention of such errors a priority. An intervention was set up to ...

Results There were 3 345 415 episodes: 21 250 (0.64%) in-hospital falls and 4559 (0.14%) fractures. In-hospital fall (IHF) episode rates increased over the study period, but fracture episode rates ...

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 ...