Advancing knowledge about how to improve the quality and safety of healthcare is a priority of BMJ Quality and Safety. Accordingly, we frequently publish studies that evaluate the effectiveness of quality improvement interventions. Methodologic advances in implementation science have had wide-spread positive impacts on healthcare delivery over the last 20 years. While many of these methods have been applied to improving quality and safety, others have rarely been applied or could be applied more often.

BMJ Quality and Safety would like to publish a series of papers on the topic of “Accelerating uptake of advances in implementation science to improve the quality and safety of patient care.” We therefore invite submissions of original research, viewpoint, review, and methodology papers related to this topic. We especially welcome submissions from implementation scientists who have not previously published in our journal – our Information for Authors pages is here.

This themed call will include submissions in the following categories:

1. Original Research: these will report research using implementation science methods to address problems with the quality and safety of health care. Manuscripts can be submitted under the ‘Original Research’, ‘Quality Improvement Report’ or ‘Short Report’ article type categories. They may present high quality evidence describing how implementation science principles and methods were used to implement an intervention and improve healthcare quality or safety. We are also interested in research that advances knowledge about measuring implementation outcomes such as acceptability, adoption, appropriateness, feasibility, fidelity, implementation cost, penetration, scaling interventions and sustainability as related to efforts to improve quality and safety. These may or may not be studies that also show improvements in care.
2. Viewpoints: these will be essays presenting a perspective or viewpoint on implementation science. These should add a new argument to a debate or present a new perspective, as well as appropriately drawing on the existing international literature. Viewpoints that compare and contrast implementation science to quality improvement/improvement science are especially welcome if they also suggest how to integrate the approaches or how to pick one approach over another.
3. Reviews: these will be any literature review relating to this topic that brings together quantitative or qualitative evidence and adds something that is more than the ‘sum of the parts’ of the included studies.
4. Research and Reporting Methodologies: articles that aim to advance research methodology or reporting standards related to implementation science in patient safety and quality improvement.

For specific formatting requirements, please refer to our author guidelines.

Manuscripts will be subject to our usual process of editorial and peer review. Please follow the online submission link https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/bmjqs to submit your manuscript(s). Upon submission, please select the theme name from the dropdown menu and mention the themed call in your cover letter. BMJ Quality and Safety is a hybrid journal and authors can choose to pay an Article Processing fee for open access publication. For further information, please visit the ‘authors’ page of our website. For additional information on another themed issue on ‘Striving for equity in the quality and safety of patient care’, please click here.

–Bryony Dean Franklin and Eric Thomas, Editors-in-Chief, BMJ Quality and Safety