BMJ blogs

Quality and safety - inseparable partners on the improvement journey

Quality and safety are intimately linked, hand in glove. You can’t really say you’re delivering quality healthcare without also addressing the safety of patients. As Associate Editor for saferhealthcare (the BMJ and National Patient Safety Agency?s joint website for patient safety) I’m always trying to sniff out good ideas, success stories, pilot studies, new approaches and the myriad of other innovations in healthcare that demonstrate improvements to safety. Many of these small scale improvements never make it into the peer reviewed literature or indeed any literature at all. Most often they are shared through informal networks, meetings and events. With this ongoing quest in mind, I joined the BMJ team in Prague for the 11th European Forum on Quality Improvement in Healthcare and volunteered my sketchy credentials in improvement as a blogger for bmj.com. (more…)

Washington, DC, 17 April 2006

Don’t know what to expect from this self-aggrandizingly named meeting. I’m familiar with medical association meetings, where politics and policy predominate, as well as research meetings, with endless paper presentations. But this one’s organized by a for-profit firm called World Congress (www.worldcongress.com) and features lots of big names (government and business, mainly), promising to offer a ‘dynamic curriculum of vision, strategy and execution road maps to improve health care quality, cost and access.’ Not sure I want an execution road map. But loads of people are paying $1000 a pop to attend. (more…)