Evaluating the investment that healthcare organisations make in quality improvement requires knowledge of impact at multiple levels, including patient care, workforce and other organisational resources. The degree to which these resources help organisations to survive and thrive in the challenging contexts in which healthcare is designed and delivered is unknown. Investigating this question fro...

Whistleblowing by health professionals is an infrequent and extraordinary event and need not occur if internal voices are heard. Mannion and Davies' editorial on "Cultures of Silence and Cultures of Voice: The Role of Whistleblowing in Healthcare Organisations" asks the question whether whistleblowing ameliorates or exacerbates the 'deaf effect' prevalent in healthcare organisations. This comme...

The methods for healthcare reform are strikingly underdeveloped, with much reliance on political power. A methodology that combined methods from sources such as clinical trials, experience-based wisdom, and improvement science could be among the aims of the upcoming work in the USA on comparative effectiveness and on the agenda of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation in the Centers f...

Despite the potential benefits of TQM, its application in healthcare organisations encountered difficulties. The main purpose of this study is to develop a model of quality management for healthcare organisations. Thirty quality management experts were approached by using a Delphi method to specify the components of an appropriate quality management model. The core research led to the developme...

Mannion and Davies’ article recognises whistleblowing as an important means of identifying quality and safety issues in healthcare organisations. While ‘voice’ is a useful lens through which to examine whistleblowing, it also obscures a shifting pattern of uncertain ‘truths.’ By contextualising cultures which support or impede whislteblowing at an organisational level, two issues are overlooked...

OBJECTIVES Schwartz Center Rounds ('Rounds') are a multidisciplinary forum in which healthcare staff within an organisation discuss the psychological, emotional and social challenges associated with their work in a confidential and safe environment. Implemented in over 375 North American organisations, since 2009, they have been increasingly adopted in England. This study aimed to establish how...

All the psoriatic arthritis and psoriasis patient advocacy organisations are devoted to promoting public awareness and patient education; supporting access to effective treatments and physicians committed to the welfare of patients; working with physicians and other organisations to facilitate development of new treatments; and supporting research for more effective treatments and a cure for ps...

A more sophisticated understanding of the unpredictable, disorderly and unstable aspects of healthcare organisations is developing in the knowledge translation (KT) literature. In an article published in this journal, Kitson et al introduced a new model for KT in healthcare based on complexity theory. The Knowledge Translation Complexity Network Model (KTCNM) provides a fresh perspective by mak...

Healthcare organizations consist of a large number of disparate information systems (IS). These have been deployed to support specific needs of healthcare organisations. The information sharing among these disparate and heterogeneous systems has always been one of the most prominent issues for the management. As every day people die in hospitals, due to medical errors, which is generally causes...