The status of accreditation in primary care.

Background: One method utilised to improve the quality of health care is accreditation. Although accreditation has been extensively used in the acute care sector, its presence in primary care is limited and so is our understanding of its nature, uptake and associated outcomes. Because acute care and primary care environments are vastly different, our understanding of acute care accreditation cannot simply be translated to primary care.

Safety incidents in family medicine.

Objective: To discuss the characteristics of incidents reported to the Medical Safety in Community Practice (MSCP) safety learning system.

Methods: Members of family physician offices in the Alberta Health Services--Calgary zone, confidentially reported patient safety incidents via web or fax from September 2007 to August 2010. The incident reporting form contained both open-ended and closed questions.

Medical safety and community practice: necessary elements and barriers to implement a safety learning system.

A safety learning system (SLS) is a system that monitors patient safety incident information and analyzes it to develop and implement improvement strategies to increase patient safety. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the necessary elements of a community-based family medicine practice SLS in Alberta Health Services - Calgary zone, and barriers to, and facilitators of, the implementation of this system. An SLS was developed in the research program Medical Safety in Community Practice.