Quality Improvement, Collaboratives, & Consultations

Back in the summer I was lucky enough to spend some time with James Dunbar and his group at the fantastic Flinders University business centre in Melbourne. We were talking about the Diabetes Collaborative that they are working to support, and using NPT as a framework to think through an unusual problem. How do you deal with implementing events that are rare? We'll have a paper about this ready for publication next year, but in the meantime there's a lot of interest in analysing quality improvement processes using NPT. This is exciting, because QI work is so vital to improving patient experience and outcomes. Trudy van der Weijden's group in the Netherlands has just published a useful and interesting paper that applies NPT to a QI trial. Trudy is one of Europe's leading knowledge translation researchers, and she and I have just participated in a really interesting project - led by Glyn Elwyn, at Dartmouth College in the US - to develop a model for deliberative decision-making in the clinical consultation. 

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The North American Primary Care Group conference is happening in New York at the moment. The brilliant Victor Montori gave a keynote on Minimally Disruptive Medicine. By all accounts, this was one of the best keynote talks ever given by anyone, and he received a well deserved standing ovation from an international assembly of primary care researchers. If you've ever given a conference plenary, you'll understand what an impossible concept a standing ovation is, and what an extraordinary presentation it must have been. I really wish I had been there!

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