- 13 October 2022
- 2 min read
Our new open-access series, Elements of Improving Quality and Safety in Healthcare, brings together critical evidence-based overviews of a diverse range of healthcare improvement approaches.
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- 6 August 2018
- 0 min read
The latest collection in our series focuses on three important approaches: making culture change happen, operational research approaches, and implementation science.
Cultural aspects of healthcare delivery are now widely regarded as important to quality of care, whether through fostering excellence or contributing to failure. Implicit in this thinking is the notion that there are good and bad cultures and that creating the right kind of culture will facilitate high-quality care. But culture is a slippery and elusive concept. What is actually meant by ‘culture’ in health services? How are cultures linked to quality and safety? And can healthcare cultures be successfully moulded and harnessed to beneficial effect?
In his Element on making culture change happen, Russell Mannion addresses these questions, examining the evidence for linking organisational culture to healthcare quality and performance.
Operational research is a collection of modelling techniques used to structure, analyse, and solve problems related to the design and operation of complex human systems. While many argue that operational research should play a key role in improving healthcare services, staff in many areas of health service planning, operation, and improvement may be largely unaware of its potential applications.
In their Element on operational research approaches, Martin Utley, Sonya Crowe, and Christina Pagel describe key concepts and common approaches in operational research, and explore its potential to help analyse and improve healthcare services.
Establishing the effectiveness of an intervention does not guarantee that it will be adopted into routine practice. In fact, the challenges of getting evidence into healthcare policy and practice have become increasingly prominent. Implementation science studies the strategies used to promote uptake of these interventions. It examines not only the systems, behaviours, and practices that influence successful implementation, and the barriers or enablers, but also the process of implementation itself – what actually gets implemented, and when, why, and how?
In their Element on implementation science, Paul Wilson and Roman Kislov critically explore theories and strategies of implementation science, and how they are or could be applied in practice.
Cambridge University Press will be publishing new collections regularly. The first collection focused on the positive deviance approach, co-producing and co-designing, and collaboration-based approaches.
We have worked with over 60 leading academic and clinical experts from over 40 organisations in the UK, Canada, France, Australia, and the USA in producing the series.
Aimed at researchers, people involved in training on healthcare improvement, and those interested in understanding current debates, the series explores the thinking behind a wide range of improvement approaches, examines evidence for each approach, and identifies gaps and challenges.
