Three questions for QSHC
- Correspondence to: Dr D P Stevens Association of American Medical Colleges, 2450 N Street NW, Washington, DC 20037, USA; dstevensaamc.org
The role of QSHC in furthering quality improvement and safety
“Every system is perfectly designed to achieve the results that it achieves”.
Don Berwick has called this the Central Law of Improvement.1 One might reasonably paraphrase Berwick’s Central Law to apply to QSHC as: “Every journal is perfectly designed to achieve the results that it achieves”. New editorial leadership provides a timely opportunity to reflect on what results QSHC might achieve going forward in advocacy for more reliable and safe patient care.
Fiona Moss has provided highly effective, expert editorial leadership over the last 13 years. During her tenure as Editor-in-Chief, the journal has made significant contributions to worldwide healthcare improvement and patient safety. In particular, it has set high standards for rigorous, sensible, and critical thinking in these emerging scholarly fields. In that spirit, her editorial in the most recent issue of QSHC forcefully challenged us to work even more effectively to integrate the roles of the patient, the clinician, and the organization for more reliable and safe care.2 I want to echo her call for urgency.
Momentum is building. “To Err is Human”3 and “Crossing the Quality Chasm”,4 two frequently cited reports issued by the Institute of Medicine of the US National Academies of Sciences, …
