Background Sepsis causes substantial morbidity and mortality in hospitalised patients. Although many studies describe the use of protocols in the management of patients with severe sepsis and septic ...

Handoffs have become integral to almost all aspects of hospital-based care. Realities such as duty hour limitations and shift ...

Methods We conducted a pragmatic quality improvement (QI) study at five US hospitals, two of which included concurrent controls. The intervention consisted of local implementation of medication ...

Background Chronic prescription opioid use is a major international public health issue associated with significant harms, including increased risk of hospitalisation, morbidity and death. Guidance ...

Aim To evaluate the effectiveness of a ‘Do not interrupt’ bundled intervention to reduce non-medication-related interruptions to nurses during medication administration. Methods A parallel eight ...

Popularisation of Lean in healthcare has led to emphasis on Lean quality improvement tools in isolation, with inconsistent results. We argue that delivery of safer, more efficient, and higher ...

The evidence is clear: a strong culture of safety is necessary to deliver reliably safe care.1 Safety culture encompasses a group's shared values, assumptions, attitudes and patterns of behaviour ...

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 ...

METHODS Of the first 4000 incidents reported to AIMS, those that made reference to regurgitation, vomiting or aspiration were extracted and analysed for relevance, presenting features, type of surgery ...

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

With public reporting and value-based payment, healthcare organisations have strong incentives to optimise quality of care, improve patient outcomes and lower costs.1 In response, organisations are ...

To flourish, practice accreditation must meet challenges. It needs to manage uncertainty over its effectiveness and cost effectiveness, to address concerns that it erodes professional autonomy, and to ...