International journal for quality in health care : journal of the International Society for Quality in Health Care
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Health care practitioners who are inexperienced in writing for publication are sometimes daunted by the publication process and fail to submit their work on quality improvement to a journal. New authors can acquire experience in writing a paper by working through a systematic thought process that includes consideration of what journal readers and editors want and if the work is ready for publication. The most important part of writing a paper is to think through the key ideas and messages for readers and then to organize the ideas into a logical structure. Writing clear answers to 10 key questions may be one way to start the process.
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Int J Qual Health Care · Oct 2001
Continuous quality improvement in small general medical practices: the attitudes of general practitioners and other practice staff.
Continuous quality improvement (CQI) offers opportunities to improve care in small-scale office-based practice. Little is yet known about the implementation of CQI in small primary care practices. We studied the attitudes of physicians and staff in small family practices to a model of CQI tailored to office-based practice setting. PRACTICES AND DESIGN: An exploratory study in 20 family practices in The Netherlands. Practices were stimulated to adopt the model for continuous quality improvement. ⋯ Our findings stress the importance of starting CQI with small, easy-to-handle projects. Workload reduction might be an important issue to focus on. Personal obstacles should be addressed throughout the introduction. We found attitudes in small-scale practices to be homogeneous, so that it was important to pay explicit attention to commitment to CQI from the start of the introduction.