America's health care systems have not achieved the desired level of quality and safety. This may be due, in part, to the lack of clear and robust approaches for institutions to follow. Denver Health, an integrated, public safety-net institution, developed a multifaceted, structured approach to quality and safety improvement that has produced positive outcomes. For example, in 2010 Denver Healt...

To cite: Margolius D, Ranji SR. BMJ Qual Saf 2015;24:477–479. Front-line healthcare workers are the first to witness the everyday errors that occur in patient care—when a medication dose is delayed, or when an unnecessary test causes harm. Residents and interns are those front-line workers in academic medical centres, working for up to 80 h a week for at least 3 years (in the USA). Just as hosp...

Improving the nutritional content of public school meals is a topic of intense policy interest. A main motivation is the health of school children, and, in particular, the rising childhood obesity rate. Medical and nutrition literature has long argued that a healthy diet can have a second important impact: improved cognitive function. In this paper, we test whether offering healthier lunches af...

BACKGROUND Although the effects of nutrition on health and school performance are often cited, few research studies have examined the effect of diet quality on the academic performance of children. This study examines the association between overall diet quality and academic performance. METHODS In 2003, 5200 grade 5 students in Nova Scotia, Canada, and their parents were surveyed as part of ...

BACKGROUND Blood Stasis syndrome (BSS) is one of the major syndromes in Traditional East Asia medicine (TEAM). Modern research of BSS began in the late1980s. METHODS We searched in PubMed for BSS-related articles published between 1989 and 2015. The publication information, study contents, and bibliometric indicators were documented and analyzed. RESULTS Most of the BSS-related studies were...

Making sound asset management decisions, such as whether to replace or maintain an ageing underground water pipe, are critical to ensure that organisations maximise the performance of their assets. These decisions are only as good as the data that supports them, and hence many asset management organisations are in desperate need to improve the quality of their data. This paper reviews the key a...

The assessment of service quality provides an important feedback for libraries to assess and improve its services to its users. This paper reports the use of an adapted SERVQUAL instrument to measure the service quality of a special library (a statutory board library). The SERVQUAL instrument, developed by marketing researchers based on the Gap Model, states that the service shortfalls experien...