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8 articles tagged quality improvement
Guidelines vs Protocols vs Pathways
These three words are used interchangeably and mean quite different things — including in court. Departing from a guideline is defensible with reasoning; departing from a protocol is a different conversation.
OrthoVellum
clinical governance / guidelines
Incident Reporting: What Happens After You Submit
Surgeons report far less than any other staff group, largely because nothing visibly happens afterwards. Here is where a report actually goes, and what makes one worth reading.
OrthoVellum
patient safety / incident reporting
Run Charts and SPC for Surgeons
Two bars cannot tell you whether anything changed. Run charts and control charts distinguish real signal from ordinary noise — and stop you reacting to variation that means nothing.
OrthoVellum
quality improvement / statistics
Root Cause Analysis After a Serious Incident
There is rarely a single root cause, and England has now moved away from mandating RCA altogether. What replaced it, how systems analysis actually works, and why hindsight bias ruins most investigations.
OrthoVellum
patient safety / human factors
Running an M&M Meeting That Changes Something
Most morbidity and mortality meetings are a list of cases followed by a shrug. The ones that work share a structure, a classification, and an actions register that gets read out first.
OrthoVellum
clinical governance / patient safety
PDSA Cycles That Actually Finish
Most surgical improvement projects die between the first measurement and the second. The reasons are predictable — and so are the fixes.
OrthoVellum
quality improvement / audit
What Clinical Governance Actually Is
Clinical governance is not a committee or a mandatory training module. It is the accountability framework that connects audit, incidents, guidelines and appraisal — and knowing how it fits together makes all of them less painful.
OrthoVellum
clinical governance / quality improvement
Audit and Quality Improvement Projects That Actually Matter
Most audits gather dust. Here is how to design quality-improvement work that genuinely changes practice and stands out on your CV.
OrthoVellum Editorial Team
audit / quality improvement