Quality assurance tool: taking a whole-system approach.

The London Cancer Alliance (LCA) has developed the Quality Clinical Board Exception Report (QCBER), a tool that supports delivery of quality assurance across its member organisations through its quality assurance framework and escalation protocol. The process improves quality assurance and performance in terms of patient safety, patient satisfaction and clinical outcomes. This article describes how implementation of a robust quality assurance process supported by a simple tool can help healthcare organisations improve patient care and avoid duplication when sharing quality information among providers and across healthcare systems.

The impact of cognitive reserve on brain functional connectivity in Alzheimer's disease.

One factor believed to impact brain resilience to the pathological damage of Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the so-called "cognitive reserve" (CR). A critical issue that still needs to be fully understood is the mechanism by which environmental enrichment interacts with brain plasticity to determine resilience to AD pathology. Previous work using PET suggests that increased brain connectivity might be at the origin of the compensatory mechanisms implicated in this process.