Domhnall MacAuley attending the BMJ/IHI 12th International Forum on Quality and Safety in Health Care, Barcelona April 2007

Airports at 5am on a working day don’t have the same excitement as holiday travel. Suits, briefcases and determined frowns keeping the economy in the air. Nothing like the indignity of putting your toiletries in a clear plastic bag for the security check to make us all equal. Not much glamour. more…

This is my visit to Prague and the first quality form I’ve attended since the first prototype in London, well over 10 years ago. It’s much bigger ‘ over 1000 delegates from 49 countries – and much more professionally run. more…

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…