If you haven’t published your work, it’s time to start
- Correspondence to: Dr David P Stevens Quality Literature Program, Dartmouth Center for Evaluative Clinical Sciences, 30 Lafayette Street, Lebanon, New Hampshire 03766, USA; David.P.Stevens{at}Dartmouth.edu
Collaborative approaches to writing provide a context for undertaking this difficult work, and publication guidelines provide standards for rigorous and useful reports
Research on healthcare improvement is incomplete until it has been published. Improvement science is now a central component of healthcare. Patients should be able to expect continuous improvement of the care they receive. Systems of care increasingly focus on efficient and effective delivery of care. To these ends, it can be argued that those who engage in improvement have a professional obligation to report their methods and results.
Improving healthcare requires precious resources—time and money. Health systems can not afford the duplication and waste that occurs when others must replicate knowledge independently. Many colleagues regularly publish their improvement innovations in this and other journals. But it is appropriate to explore the challenges as well as the opportunities for a wider commitment to publication by improvement experts.1,2
First, improvement professionals often consider their work too local or idiosyncratic to merit generalisation to wider settings, even questioning whether a local project could be replicated in other settings. Second, busy clinicians and managers find they simply cannot …
