The stepped-wedge cluster randomised trial is a popular design in implementation and health services research. All clusters, such as clinics or hospitals, start in the control state, and gradually ...

Background Patients are safer and receive higher quality care when providers work as a highly effective team. Investment in optimising healthcare teamwork has swelled in the last 10 years.

Background Effective communication is critical for patient safety. One potential threat to communication in the operating room is incivility. Although examined in other industries, little has been ...

Efforts to ensure effective participation of patients in healthcare are called by many names—patient centredness, patient engagement, patient experience. Improvement initiatives in this domain often ...

Diagnostic errors are associated with patient harm and suboptimal outcomes. Despite national scientific efforts to advance definition, measurement and interventions for diagnostic error, diagnosis in ...

Background Safe and effective patient handovers remain a global organisational and training challenge. Limited evidence supports available handover training programmes. Customisable training is a ...

Background Transfers of care, also known as handovers, remain a substantial patient safety risk. Although research on handovers has been done since the 1980s, the science is incomplete. Surprisingly ...

Background Unrecognised changes in a hospitalised patient’s clinical course may lead to a preventable adverse event. Early warning systems (EWS) use patient data, such as vital signs, nursing ...

Context can be defined as all factors that are not part of a quality improvement intervention itself. More research indicates which aspects are ‘conditions for improvement’, which influence ...

The traditional separation of the producers of research evidence in academia from the users of that evidence in healthcare organisations has not succeeded in closing the gap between what is known ...

Background Evidence that hand hygiene (HH) reduces healthcare-associated infections has been available for almost two centuries. Yet HH compliance among healthcare professionals continues to be low, ...

Background Failure to follow-up test results is a critical safety issue. The objective was to systematically review evidence quantifying the extent of failure to follow-up test results and the impact ...