Is there evidence for your quality improvement intervention?

Is there evidence for the interventions we're using to improve quality of services and to reduce costs? I suspect in many cases there isn't. Sometimes just doing something is better than nothing, though I do find it surprising that some organisations are strong at pushing a particular intervention, even though there are few (unpaid for) independent evaluations. And on the other hand, there are some well evidenced interventions that organisations don't want to use because they are appear old fashioned. Hmmm - we demand of healthcare professionals that they use the best evidenced methods - should we be demanding that of ourselves?

There's an excellent visualisation for the scientific evidence of dietary supplements. When I looked at this I wondered whether we could do something similar for the quality improvement interventions that are being used around the world?

In the meantime, using the SQUIRE Guidelines to write up your projects will go a long way to building up an evidence base of what works - and what doesn't.