Improvement in Practice
From the QI Community
By Amy Kantor
What We Learned About Improvement in 2025
This month on the Quality Catalyst we’re connecting you with thoughtful reflections from the Quality Improvement Community on improvement in practice. Jason Williams with LifeQI shares in his Blog Post What We Learned About Improvement in 2025:
“… we’ve published a wide range of articles on improvement - drawing on conversations with healthcare teams, improvement leads, senior leaders, and system partners. While each article focused on a specific challenge, a few clear themes kept reappearing. This post brings those themes together. Rather than a “most-read” list, it’s a reflection on what the year taught us about how improvement really works in practice - and what teams heading into 2026 might want to keep in mind.”
Check it out for remarkable insights not only on tips for improvement success and key takeaways, but also real, tangible strategies on how to overcome some of the most common challenges with improvement work.
Bonus – more great articles on Metrics to Measure Success of a QI Project, How to Ensure Spread and Sustainability and more linked inside!
Read it all here! What We Learned About Improvement in 2025.
And on that note of sustaining improvement in healthcare, what if the challenge in success isn’t with the implementation but rather “deimplementation” and deliberately forgetting or stopping the old way of doing things?
Here is a fascinating editorial from the BMJ Quality & Safety Journal on Learning to forget: deimplementation and the science of sustainability in healthcare.
Where do ideas for improvement in healthcare come from anyway?
Many times improvement ideas may start with someone noticing an opportunity to make something better or in other cases, ideas might be generated when an error or a close call occurs.
To move those errors and close calls into a place of improvement, teams need to be able to talk about it in a safe and supported way. We call this a Just Culture - an atmosphere of trust in which healthcare workers are supported and treated fairly when something goes wrong with patient care.
Look here for information from Health Quality Alberta on building a just culture for safer patient care.
Is your team experiencing challenges with just culture? Here are some simple strategies and approaches for overcoming barriers.
Watch this 5 minute video of Annie’s Story to see an example of how one healthcare organization embraced a just culture and systems approach to a clinical adverse event and what it really meant to the staff involved.
Let us know in the Comments or Discussion Page what resonated with you!
