Abstract

Although the actions of a particular clinician with an
individual patient in the consultation are important
for a successful outcome for that service user, quality
improvement is rarely due to individual efforts. Instead,
it is usually the sum of actions of individuals linked through their professional roles, the teams and organisations in which they work as well as the wider
context of health care. These together constitute the
system of care; the focus therefore has to be to develop
the system in order to support individual clinical decisions
at the front line of health care. The series of
editorial and discussion papers in this themed issue
on ‘Organisational and Educational Interventions for
Quality Improvement’ tackle how this might be best
achieved. They address which organisational interventions
improve care, why education underpins their
effectiveness, how the organisational context provides
the glue to link these and the contribution of the wider
policy context to fuel change.