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 ...

Objectives Many hospitals use fall prevention alarms, despite the limited evidence of effectiveness. The objectives of this study were (1) to identify, conceptualise and select strategies to ...

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 ...

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

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 ...

Objective To understand how lean thinking has been put into practice in healthcare and how it has worked. Design A realist literature review. Data sources The authors systematically searched for ...

Background Increasing attention is being given to the importance of communication in the delivery of high-quality healthcare. We sought to determine whether communication improved in a hospital ...

Background Problems of quality and safety persist in health systems worldwide. We conducted a large research programme to examine culture and behaviour in the English National Health Service (NHS).

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 ...

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

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 ...