World Health Organization World Hand Hygiene Day, 5 May 2024 SAVE LIVES: Clean Your Hands campaign Promoting knowledge and capacity building on infection prevention and control, including hand hygiene, among health and care workers The World Health Organization’s (WHO) World Hand Hygiene Day has a goal to bring people together and accelerate hand hygiene […]
Tag: health systems
Introducing the Top Research Articles of 2023
Choosing the top articles published in BMJ Quality and Safety is always both a joy and a challenge, and 2023 was no exception. We saw a high number of submissions, with a broad range of topics and study designs. As ever, our editors and editorial board had some difficult choices to make in selecting the […]
The Electronic Health Record feedback journey of a thousand miles begins with . . .
At some point in most clinical careers, a patient recently seen by the clinician will be diagnosed by a subsequent clinician with something either unusual or unexpected. Ideally, the first clinician would learn of this new diagnosis quickly and have time and space for reflection, self-evaluation, and identification of anything they could have done differently. […]
Rapid Improvements in Medication Safety with Bedside Learning Coordinators in the Nightingale Learning System
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the National Health Service (NHS) in England rapidly created the NHS Nightingale Hospital London (‘the Nightingale’) – a field hospital providing additional clinical capacity to support the NHS. This unique clinical environment presented both familiar and new, complex challenges in ensuring safe use of medicines. As part of the creation of […]
Introducing the Top Articles of 2020
While choosing the top articles published in BMJ Quality & Safety is a challenge every year, 2020 saw even greater numbers of submissions than in previous years. The editors and editorial board of the journal therefore had some difficult choices to make about the top articles of the year, taking into account downloads, citations, Altmetrics […]
Driving positive change: what can we learn from compliment letters?
Patient perceptions of care have been recognized as a key component of healthcare quality for over 30 years.1 Patient satisfaction began being reported at the hospital level in the US in 2007.2 However, despite recent institutional and governmental emphasis on satisfaction measures, studies have not shown consistent ways in which using these results can drive […]
Virtual patient visits: bringing into view family member-staff relationships in times of COVID-19
Physical distancing measures during the COVID-19 pandemic have hindered communication between hospitalised patients and their family members. Sasangohar and colleagues[i] provide insight into use of an existing virtual intensive care unit (ICU) to facilitate online family visits amid Covid-19 visiting restrictions at a large, tertiary hospital in the United States. The paper raises some fascinating […]
Advanced analytics in healthcare: ready for primetime?
After Michael Lewis’s 2003 book Moneyball revealed that statistical analysis seemed to offer an edge to baseball’s Oakland Athletics, reformers in many other fields tried to emulate the team’s success. There was ‘moneyball for government,’ ‘moneyball for education,’ ‘moneyball for policing’ – initiatives founded on the idea that the introduction of data analysis might upend […]
System-level initiatives to reduce persistently elevated blood pressures in hypertensive patients: how do we overcome clinical inertia?
In the United States, research consistently shows around half of adults with hypertension do not achieve recommended control of their blood pressure (BP).1 Poor BP control at the population level then leads to higher rates of preventable negative cardiovascular outcomes, like strokes and heart attacks. As recently reported, Elizabeth Pfoh and colleagues studied a quality […]