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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

In this month’s edition, Mandel and Cady draw on organisational change theories to argue that quality improvement (QI), as currently deployed, is self-limiting.1 In other words, if left untamed it ...

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 ...

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 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 ...

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 ...

Doing ‘detective work’ to find a cancer: how are non-specific symptom pathways for cancer investigation organised, and what are the implications for safety and quality of care? A multisite qualitative ...

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 ...

The number of people living with and beyond cancer is rising rapidly. With earlier detection and better treatments many people are living for years following a diagnosis of cancer. Healthcare systems ...

Results Fifteen unique economic evaluations were eligible, encompassing 74 hospitals. Across 12 studies amenable to standardisation, QI interventions were associated with a 43% decline in infections ...