FOCUS: Healthcare Quality and Safety 

Focus Edition Guest Editor

Professor Emeritus Gwen Sherwood 

Reports continue to cite patient care quality and safety as leading concerns in every country. Nurses have critical roles in helping transform healthcare systems to create cultures of quality and safety. Sharing outcomes of innovative approaches can help to speed the process of change. The six quality and safety competencies from the Quality and Safety Education for Nurses (QSEN) project first launched in the United States is an example of a framework used in a range of initiatives including curricular redesign, updated professional practice models, and quality improvement projects: patient-centered care, teamwork and collaboration, quality improvement, evidence-based practice, safety, and informatics. Systems thinking and second-order problem solving can alleviate risks of harm by identifying and redesigning processes to strive for high reliability. 

For this edition of JRN, we are seeking papers that may be research studies of any design, case-studies, evaluations, education, or practice development initiatives, which focus on the many aspects of patient care quality and safety that frameworks such as the QSEN identify. 

Examples include:

• Nurse driven initiatives and quality improvement strategies to alleviate preventable patient harm in all healthcare delivery settings
• Inter-professional approaches to transform healthcare environments to improve patient care quality and safety
• Education strategies, models, frameworks, and curricula that demonstrate changes in knowledge, skills, and attitudes undergirding patient safety and quality
• Policies and innovative frameworks influencing the various components of safety such as just culture, high reliability, and organizational leadership
• Outcome measures for implementing the six QSEN competencies 

Authors interested in contributing to this edition of JRN with a focus on ‘patient care quality and safety should submit their proposed paper by 1st May 2020 to Louise Thrift, JRN Editorial Assistant jrn@sagepub.ac.uk for consideration by the editors. 

Papers must be submitted online and adhere to the JRN manuscripts guidelines that can be accessed from the journal homepage: http://jrn.sagepub.com/ Papers should have a maximum of 5,000 words including references. Where appropriate, supplementary files may accompany the paper. The contribution of the paper to, or implications for, both nursing practice and health and social care policy must be made explicit. 

All papers will be double-blind peer-reviewed. Accepted papers may be published OnlineFirst and issued with a doi number. A commentary is published alongside each paper. 

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