SQUIRE after one year.

DEVELOPMENT OF SQUIRE—THE IMPERATIVE FOR SCHOLARLY PUBLICATION Gaps in the quality of healthcare, characterised over a decade ago as a chasm, continue to demand systematic resolution. Local improvement initiatives are essential to better, safer care of patients, but the spread of such local improvement widely to other settings requires the scholarly publication that has always resided at the heart of science-based healthcare. Moreover, as increasing numbers of clinical specialties embrace the imperative for healthcare improvement and patient safety, a recognisable format for scholarly publication can provide common ground for the shared new knowledge. The SQUIRE publication guidelines were developed in an effort to contribute to the expanding scholarship of healthcare improvement. Similar to scholarly publication guidelines for other fields (e.g. CONSORT guidelines for randomised controlled trials), SQUIRE was developed to provide the critical elements of scholarly reports as a common framework for authors, editors and readers. They were originally promulgated as a draft in QSHC in 2005. That draft was followed by strategic efforts directed at its refinement—road-testing the draft guidelines by authors who used them for published reports, a conference of authors and editors to distil their content and format and a Delphi process, which invited more than 50 colleagues to contribute to their revision. That resulting product—SQUIRE—and a description of its development were reported in a supplement to QSHC in October 2008.