For many readers, the story of the quality of care at Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust in the UK from 2005 to 2009 will need little introduction. The substandard care provided and the combination of ...

Introduction: Care home residents are at particular risk from medication errors, and our objective was to determine the prevalence and potential harm of prescribing, monitoring, dispensing and ...

Background The ability to capture the complexities of healthcare practices and the quick turnaround of findings make rapid ethnographies appealing to the healthcare sector, where changing ...

Background Effective communication is critical for patient safety. One potential threat to communication in the operating room is incivility. Although examined in other industries, little has been ...

The stepped-wedge cluster randomised trial is a popular design in implementation and health services research. All clusters, such as clinics or hospitals, start in the control state, and gradually ...

Grand rounds in methodology: four critical decision points in statistical process control evaluations of quality improvement initiatives ...

Background: The transfer of care for hospitalized patients between inpatient physicians is routinely mediated through written and verbal communication or “sign-out”. This study aims to describe how ...

Background Continuity in the general practitioner (GP)-patient relationship is associated with better healthcare outcomes. However, few studies have examined the impact of permanent discontinuities on ...

Background Plan–do–study–act (PDSA) cycles provide a structure for iterative testing of changes to improve quality of systems. The method is widely accepted in healthcare improvement; however there is ...

The article by Cho et al 1 in the current issue of BMJ Quality and Safety addresses the persistent and debilitating problem of hospital falls, which remain a challenge worldwide. Despite decades of ...

Background Inpatient falls are adverse events that often result in injury due to complex interactions between the hospital environment and patient risk factors and remain a significant problem in ...

Context Ambulatory adverse events (AEs) affect up to 25% of the global population and cause over 7 million preventable hospital admissions around the world. Though patients and caregivers are key ...