ArticleQuality & safety in health care2005
Narrative methods in quality improvement research.
Article in Quality & safety in health care, 2005. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 46 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
46 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Narratives reflecting the lived experiences of people with brain disorders: common psychosocial difficulties and determinants.PloS one · 2014Pooled it
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- Implementation of a brief intensive education programme in quality improvement.BMJ open quality · 2026Article
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- Time for a New Norm: Experiences of 'Being Informed' and 'Having Choice' for Prenatal Screening for Chromosomal Conditions: A Qualitative Study.Health expectations : an international journal of public participation in health care and health policy · 2025Article
- Pharmaceutical Humanities and Narrative Pharmacy: An Emerging New Concept in Pharmacy.Pharmaceuticals (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- [Reflections on integrating narrative medicine concepts into the development of pediatrics].Zhongguo dang dai er ke za zhi = Chinese journal of contemporary pediatrics · 2024Article
- A framework for remotely enabled co-design with young people: its development and application with neurodiverse children and their caregivers.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2024Article
- Living with polypharmacy: a narrative interview study with older Pakistanis in East London.BMC geriatrics · 2023Article
- Racial disparity in breast cancer survivorship: themes from a series of four national healthcare provider live virtual forums.Journal of cancer survivorship : research and practice · 2023Article
- Opportunities for shared decision-making about major surgery with high-risk patients: a multi-method qualitative study.British journal of anaesthesia · 2023Article
- A narrative inquiry into healthcare staff resilience and the sustainability of Quality Improvement implementation efforts during Covid-19.BMC health services research · 2023Article
- Am I safe? An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis of Vulnerability as Experienced by Patients With Complications Following Surgery.Qualitative health research · 2022Article
- 'You can't walk through water without getting wet' UK nurses' distress and psychological health needs during the Covid-19 pandemic: A longitudinal interview study.International journal of nursing studies · 2022Article
- A Refugee Rose of competencies and capabilities for mental healthcare of refugees.BJPsych open · 2022Article
- Optimising co-design with ethnic minority consumers.International journal for equity in health · 2021Article
- Context and Complexity in Telemedicine Evaluation: Work Domain Analysis in a Surgical Setting.JMIR perioperative medicine · 2021Article
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Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
This paper reviews and critiques the different approaches to the use of narrative in quality improvement research. The defining characteristics of narrative are chronology (unfolding over time); emplotment (the literary juxtaposing of actions and events in an implicitly causal sequence); trouble (that is, harm or the risk of harm); and embeddedness (the personal story nests within a particular social, historical and organisational context). Stories are about purposeful action unfolding in the face of trouble and, as such, have much to offer quality improvement researchers. But the quality improvement report (a story about efforts to implement change), which is common, must be distinguished carefully from narrative based quality improvement research (focused systematic enquiry that uses narrative methods to generate new knowledge), which is currently none. We distinguish four approaches to the use of narrative in quality improvement research--narrative interview; naturalistic story gathering; organisational case study; and collective sense-making--and offer a rationale, describe how data can be collected and analysed, and discuss the strengths and limitations of each using examples from the quality improvement literature. Narrative research raises epistemological questions about the nature of narrative truth (characterised by sense-making and emotional impact rather than scientific objectivity), which has implications for how rigour should be defined (and how it might be achieved) in this type of research. We offer some provisional guidance for distinguishing high quality narrative research in a quality improvement setting from other forms of narrative account such as report, anecdote, and journalism.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.