‘The Problem with…’ series covers controversial topics related to efforts to improve healthcare quality, including widely recommended but deceptively difficult strategies for improvement and pervasive ...

Investigations of accidents in a number of hazardous domains suggest that a cluster of organisational pathologies—the “vulnerable system syndrome” (VSS)—render some systems more liable to adverse ...

The clinical microsystem puts medical error and harm reduction into the broader context of safety and quality of care by providing a framework to assess and evaluate ...

CPPM, School of Management, The Gateway Building, North Haugh, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Fife, Scotland Correspondence to: R Rushmer CPPM, School of Management, The Gateway Building, North ...

Background Efforts to improve the implementation of effective practice and to speed up improvements in quality and patient safety continue to pose challenges for researchers and policy makers.

Background Hospitalist medicine was predicated on the belief that providers dedicated to inpatient care would deliver higher quality and more cost-effective care to acutely hospitalised patients. The ...

Correspondence to Dr Stephanie Tierney, University of Warwick Warwick Medical School, Warwick Medical School, Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK; stephanie.tierney{at}warwick.ac.uk Nursing, in particular, has been ...

2 Department of Neurobiology, Care Sciences and Society, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden 3 Department of Social Work, Karolinska University Hospital, Stockholm, Sweden Background Advocates ...

1 The Centre for Medical and Health Sciences Education, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand 2 University of Auckland School of Medicine, Auckland, New Zealand 3 Simulation Centre for Patient ...

2 Center for Innovation in Interprofessional Education, University of California, San Francisco, California, USA 3 Department of Anesthesia and Perioperative Care, University of California San ...

Traditional quality control methods identify “variation” as the enemy. However, the control of variation by itself can never achieve the remarkably low non-conformance rates of world class quality ...

To date, improvement in health care has relied mainly on a “top down” programme by programme approach to service change and development. This has spawned a multitude of different and often impressive ...