A wide variety of research studies suggest that breakdowns in the diagnostic process result in a staggering toll of harm and patient deaths. These include autopsy studies, case reviews, surveys of ...

Correspondence to Atle Fretheim, Global Health Unit, Norwegian Knowledge Centre for the Health Services, P.O. Box 7004, St. Olavs, Oslo 0130, Norway; atle.fretheim{at}nokc.no Time series plots are ...

Objective—To review the literature on the benefits and disadvantages of clinical and medical audit, and to assess the main facilitators and barriers to conducting the audit process. Design—A ...

Objectives To determine the association of hospital nursing skill mix with patient mortality, patient ratings of their care and indicators of quality of care. Design Cross-sectional patient discharge ...

Objective To contextualise the degree of harm that comes from unsafe medical care compared with individual health conditions using the global burden of disease (GBD), a metric to determine how much ...

Objectives The aim of this article is to provide an estimate of the proportion of the general public reporting healthcare-related harm in Great Britain, its location, impact, responses post-harm and ...

Objective Valid, reliable critical appraisal tools advance quality improvement (QI) intervention impacts by helping stakeholders identify higher quality studies. QI approaches are diverse and differ ...

Background Healthcare organisations have legal and ethical duties to reduce inequalities in access to healthcare services and related outcomes. However, lesbian, gay, bisexual and/or transgender ...

Correspondence to Dr Jeffrey L Schnipper, Division of General Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital Department of Medicine, Boston, MA 02115-6110, USA; jschnipper ...

Social Science Applied to Healthcare Improvement Research Group, Department of Health Sciences, School of Medicine, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK Correspondence to Professor Mary Dixon-Woods, ...

Diagnosis is one of the most important tasks performed by primary care physicians. The World Health Organization (WHO) recently prioritized patient safety areas in primary care, and included ...

Background Tools that proactively identify factors that contribute to accidents have been developed within high-risk industries. Although patients provide feedback on their experience of care in ...