BMJ Quality & Safety: new opportunities for better, safer healthcare

Quality and Safety in Health Care has established itself in recent years as the premier journal in the fields of quality improvement and patient safety. We now receive approximately 800 manuscripts a year, and the journal has an impact factor of 2.8, making it the highest impact journal in the field. A number of changes have occurred at the Journal in 2011, changes which will hopefully continue and enhance the trajectory of excellence established by the previous Editor, Dr David Stevens.1 First, consistent with the large number of submissions, the Journal increased in publication from bimonthly to monthly as of January 2011. Second, the Journal's name changed to BMJ Quality & Safety to reflect not just the ownership, but also the BMJ Group's interest in highlighting healthcare improvement as part of its mandate. All of the major general medical journals have published articles related to healthcare quality or patient safety in the past 10 years. But, one could argue that the BMJ publishes the widest range of original research, reviews, commentaries, and debates on issues related to these topics. Most notably, the BMJ has published robust qualitative and mixed methods research,2 3 which are often poorly received at major general journals but represent crucial approaches to evaluating healthcare improvement initiatives. Given this sustained attention to healthcare quality in the BMJ , the new name for our journal seems particularly fitting. A third change at the Journal is its co-ownership by the Health Foundation and the BMJ Group. As readers in the UK probably know already, the Health Foundation (http://www.health.org.uk/) is an independent charity committed to improving healthcare systems. It pursues this mission by identifying important quality and safety challenges, collaborating with others to design innovative solutions to those challenges, and implementing …