The number of people living with and beyond cancer is rising rapidly. With earlier detection and better treatments many people are living for years following a diagnosis of cancer. Healthcare systems ...

It is time to pay more attention to incident analysis Incident reporting lies at the heart of many initiatives to improve patient safety. The UK National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA)1 has recently ...

There is a need for the traditional risk management model, which focuses on department based risk assessment, loss management and risk financing, to evolve to enable it to become more responsive to ...

Individual learning Risky behaviours are easiest to perceive at the sharp end of care—where the health professional and patient interact. This is the most readily apparent place for allocating ...

The cluster randomised trial (CRT) is commonly used in healthcare research. It is the gold-standard study design for evaluating healthcare policy interventions. A key characteristic of this design is ...

Effective improvement and research rely on sustained multidisciplinary collaboration, but few examples are available of centres with the broad range of disciplines and practical experience that are ...

Administrative data are readily available, inexpensive, computer readable, and cover large populations. Despite coding irregularities and limited clinical details, administrative data supplemented by ...

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 ...

What progress have we made? One of the earliest references to human factors in the healthcare literature dates back to 1957 and calls for equipment to be designed in terms of human capabilities and ...

Background Medication non-adherence in ambulatory care has received substantial attention in the literature, but less so as it affects acute care. Accordingly, we aimed to estimate the frequency with ...

Despite some notable advances in patient safety (eg, an average 17% reduction across a set of hospital-acquired conditions including adverse drug events and urinary tract infections in the USA between ...

Purpose To determine the effectiveness of patient safety culture strategies to improve hospital patient safety climate. Data sources Electronic search of the Cochrane Library, OVID Medline, Embase, ...