As the science of quality improvement in health care advances, the importance of sharing its accomplishments through the published literature increases. Current reporting of improvement work in health care varies widely in both content and quality. It is against this backdrop that a group of stakeholders from a variety of disciplines has created the Standards for QUality Improvement Reporting Excellence, which we refer to as the SQUIRE publication guidelines or SQUIRE statement. The SQUIRE statement consists of a checklist of 19 items that authors need to consider when writing articles that describe formal studies of quality improvement. Most of the items in the checklist are common to all scientific reporting, but virtually all of them have been modified to reflect the unique nature of medical improvement work.This “Explanation and Elaboration” document (E & E) is a companion to the SQUIRE statement. For each item in the SQUIRE guidelines the E & E document provides one or two examples from the published improvement literature, followed by an analysis of the ways in which the example expresses the intent of the guideline item. As with the E & E documents created to accompany other biomedical publication guidelines, the purpose of the SQUIRE E & E document is to assist authors along the path from completion of a quality improvement project to its publication. The SQUIRE statement itself, this E & E document, and additional information about reporting improvement work can be found at http://www.squire-statement.org.

Background: Evidence that hand hygiene (HH) reduces healthcare-associated infections has been available for almost two centuries. Yet HH compliance among healthcare professionals continues to be low, and most efforts to improve it have failed. Objective: To improve healthcare workers' HH, and reduce healthcare-associated infections. Design: 3-year interrupted time series with multiple sequential interventions and 1-year post-intervention follow-up. Setting: Teaching hospital in rural New Hampshire. Interventions: In five categories: (1) leadership/ accountability; (2) measurement/feedback; (3) hand sanitiser availability; (4) education/training; and (5) marketing/communication. Measurement: Monthly changes in observed HH compliance (%) and rates of healthcare-associated infection (including Staphylococcus aureus infections, Clostridium difficile infections and bloodstream infections) per 1000 inpatient days. The subset of S aureus infections attributable to the operating room served as a tracer condition. We used statistical process control charts to identify significant changes. Results: HH compliance increased significantly from 41% to 87% (p<0.01) during the initiative, and improved further to 91% (p<0.01) the following year. Nurses achieved higher HH compliance (93%) than physicians (78%). There was a significant, sustained decline in the healthcare-associated infection rate from 4.8 to 3.3 (p<0.01) per 1000 inpatient days. The rate of S aureus infections attributable to the operating room rose, while the rate of other S aureus infections fell. Conclusions: Our initiative was associated with a large and significant hospital-wide improvement in HH which was sustained through the following year and a significant, sustained reduction in the incidence of healthcare-associated infection. The observed increased incidence of the tracer condition supports the assertion that HH improvement contributed to infection reduction. Persistent variation in HH

Background Contrast-induced acute kidney injury (CI-AKI) is associated with increased morbidity and mortality following percutaneous coronary interventions (PCI) and is a patient safety objective of the National Quality Forum. However, no formal quality improvement program to prevent CI-AKI has been conducted. Therefore, we sought to determine if a six-year regional multi-center quality improvement intervention could reduce CI-AKI following PCI. Methods and Results We conducted a prospective multi-center quality improvement study to prevent CI-AKI (serum creatinine increase ≥0.3 mg/dL within 48 hours or ≥50% during hospitalization) among 21,067 non-emergent patients undergoing PCI at ten hospitals between 2007 and 2012. Six ‘intervention’ hospitals participated in the quality improvement intervention. Two hospitals with significantly lower baseline rates of CI-AKI, which served as “benchmark” sites and were used to develop the intervention and two hospitals not receiving the intervention were used as controls. Using time series analysis and multilevel poisson regression clustering to the hospital-level we calculated adjusted risk ratios (RR) for CI-AKI comparing the intervention period to baseline. Adjusted rates of CI-AKI were significantly reduced in hospitals receiving the intervention by 21% (RR 0.79; 95%CI: 0.67 to 0.93; p=0.005) for all patients and by 28% in patients with baseline eGFR<60 ml/min/1.73 m2 (RR 0.72; 95%CI: 0.56 to 0.91; p=0.007). Benchmark hospitals had no significant changes in CI-AKI. Key qualitative system factors associated with improvement included: multidisciplinary teams, limiting contrast volume, standardized fluid orders, intravenous fluid bolus, and patient education about oral hydration. Conclusions Simple cost-effective quality improvement interventions can prevent up to one in five CI-AKI events in patients with undergoing non-emergent PCI.