Evaluation of the Scottish Patient Safety Programme (SPSP) sepsis VTE collaborative: Short report

From summary: The collaborative is an increasingly popular approach to improvement in healthcare. The most widely used model is the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s (IHI) ‘Breakthrough Series collaborative’ (BTS) model, 1 in which a community of practitioners use continuous quality improvement methods to achieve improvement towards specific aims, supported by a core of expert faculty. There is evidence that collaboratives can be effective as an approach to improvement, but their effectiveness is likely to be partly dependent on their particular organisation and structure, and the programme context. Although some consensus has been reached about the factors that influence the success of a collaborative approach, a lack of empirical evidence persists about how the approach can be optimised. We report a summary of findings from a qualitative evaluation of the Scottish Patient Safety Programme (SPSP) sepsis VTE collaborative.