The Many Meanings of ‘Quality’ in Healthcare: Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Clinical realism: a new literary genre and a potential tool for encouraging empathy in medical students

Empathy has been re-discovered as a desirable quality in doctors. A number of approaches using the medical humanities have been advocated to teach empathy to medical students. This paper describes a new approa...

Authors: Paula McDonald, Katy Ashton, Rachel Barratt, Simon Doyle, Dorrie Imeson, Amos Meir and Gregoire Risser

Confronting the quality paradox: towards new characterisations of ‘quality’ in contemporary healthcare

This editorial introduces the special Biomed Central cross-journal collection The Many Meanings of ‘Quality’ in Healthcare: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, setting out the context for the development of the colle...

Authors: Deborah Swinglehurst, Nathan Emmerich, Jo Maybin, Sophie Park and Sally Quilligan

Hospital board oversight of quality and safety: a stakeholder analysis exploring the role of trust and intelligence

Hospital boards, those executive members charged with developing appropriate organisational strategies and cultures, have an important role to play in safeguarding the care provided by their organisation. Howe...

Authors: Ross Millar, Tim Freeman and Russell Mannion

Using clinical supervision to improve the quality and safety of patient care: a response to Berwick and Francis

After widely publicised investigations into excess patient deaths at Mid Staffordshire hospital the UK government commissioned reports from Robert Francis QC and Professor Don Berwick. Among their recommendati...

Authors: Jonathon Tomlinson

‘Trust my doctor, trust my pancreas’: trust as an emergent quality of social practice

Growing attention is being paid to the importance of trust, and its corollaries such as mistrust and distrust, in health service and the central place they have in assessments of quality of care. Although init...

Authors: Simon Cohn

Caring for quality of care: symbolic violence and the bureaucracies of audit

This article considers the moral notion of care in the context of Quality of Care discourses. Whilst care has clear normative implications for the delivery of health care it is less clear how Quality of Care, ...

Authors: Nathan Emmerich, Deborah Swinglehurst, Jo Maybin, Sophie Park and Sally Quilligan

The changing landscape of care: does ethics education have a new role to play in health practice?

In the UK, higher education and health care providers share responsibility for educating the workforce. The challenges facing health practice also face health education and as educators we are implicated, by t...

Authors: Julie Wintrup

Reconsidering ‘ethics’ and ‘quality’ in healthcare research: the case for an iterative ethical paradigm

UK-based research conducted within a healthcare setting generally requires approval from the National Research Ethics Service. Research ethics committees are required to assess a vast range of proposals, diffe...

Authors: Fiona A Stevenson, William Gibson, Caroline Pelletier, Vasiliki Chrysikou and Sophie Park

Accounting for quality: on the relationship between accounting and quality improvement in healthcare

Accounting-that is, standardized measurement, public reporting, performance evaluation and managerial control-is commonly seen to provide the core infrastructure for quality improvement in healthcare. Yet, acc...

Authors: Dane Pflueger

Caring for the patient, caring for the record: an ethnographic study of ‘back office’ work in upholding quality of care in general practice

The quality of information recorded about patient care is considered key to improving the overall quality, safety and efficiency of patient care. Assigning codes to patients’ records is an important aspect of ...

Authors: Deborah Swinglehurst and Trisha Greenhalgh

Understanding staff perspectives of quality in practice in healthcare

Extensive work has been focussed on developing and analysing different performance and quality measures in health services. However less has been published on how practitioners understand and assess performanc...

Authors: Michelle Farr and Peter Cressey

Developing patient-centred care: an ethnographic study of patient perceptions and influence on quality improvement

Understanding quality improvement from a patient perspective is important for delivering patient-centred care. Yet the ways patients define quality improvement remains unexplored with patients often excluded f...

Authors: Alicia Renedo and Cicely Marston

Multiple sclerosis outpatient future groups: improving the quality of participant interaction and ideation tools within service improvement activities

Improving the patient experience is a key focus within the National Health Service. This has led us to consider how health services are experienced, from both staff and patient perspectives. Novel service impr...

Authors: Alison Thomson, Carol Rivas and Gavin Giovannoni

Making sense of technology adoption in healthcare: meso-level considerations

It has been clear for some time that the development of telecare faces significant problems. Large scale studies and clinical trials seem to suggest that the cost and clinical effectiveness of telecare systems...

Authors: Carl R May

What is quality in assisted living technology? The ARCHIE framework for effective telehealth and telecare services

We sought to define quality in telehealth and telecare with the aim of improving the proportion of patients who receive appropriate, acceptable and workable technologies and services to support them living wit...

Authors: Trisha Greenhalgh, Rob Procter, Joe Wherton, Paul Sugarhood, Sue Hinder and Mark Rouncefield

“Arm in arm with righteousness”

Authors: Iona Heath

Unmasking quality: exploring meanings of health by doing art

Quality in healthcare has many potential meanings and interpretations. The case has been made for conceptualisations of quality that place more emphasis on describing quality and less on measuring it through s...

Authors: Moira Kelly, Carol Rivas, Jens Foell, Janet Llewellyn-Dunn, Diana England, Anna Cocciadiferro and Sally Hull