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 ...

Methods The collection of data by NAERS has been described elsewhere 12 and is detailed in Appendix 1 (web-only material) with the reporting categories detailed in Appendix 2 (web-only material). A ...

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 ...

The Institute of Medicine report To Err Is Human shone a spotlight on preventable medical errors and since the release of the report patient safety has become the pre-eminent issue for health care. 1 ...

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 ...

Background The authors aimed to determine US and UK doctors' professional values and reported behaviours, and the extent to which these vary with the context of care. Method 1891 US and 1078 UK ...

CDS-Dx work The report by Sibbald et al published in this issue of BMJ Quality & Safety adds to the growing evidence that decision support can improve the diagnostic process. 4 This study was ...