The cluster randomised trial (CRT) is commonly used in healthcare research. It is the gold-standard study design for evaluating healthcare policy interventions. A key characteristic of this design is ...

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 ...

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 ...

Administrative data are readily available, inexpensive, computer readable, and cover large populations. Despite coding irregularities and limited clinical details, administrative data supplemented by ...

Background Although well-established principles exist for improving the timeliness and efficiency of care, many organisations struggle to achieve more than small-scale, localised gains. Where care ...

Background The positive deviance approach focuses on those who demonstrate exceptional performance, despite facing the same constraints as others. ‘Positive deviants’ are identified and hypotheses ...

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 methods of evaluating change and improvement strategies are not well described. The design and conduct of a range of experimental and non-experimental quantitative designs are considered. Such ...

Medical errors continue to occur despite multiple strategies devised for their prevention. Although many safety initiatives lead to improvement, they are often short lived and unsustainable. Our goal ...

Background Incident reporting is a promising tool to enhance patient safety, but few empirical studies have been conducted to identify factors that increase the number of incident reports. Objective ...

Introduction Health information technology (health IT) has potential to improve patient safety but its implementation and use has met with unintended consequences and new safety concerns. 1–5 A key ...