Exploring the role of communications in quality improvement: A case study of the 1000 Lives Campaign in NHS Wales

Summary

Effective communication is critical to successful large-scale change. Yet, in our experience, communications strategies are not formally incorporated into quality improvement frameworks.

The 1000 Lives Campaign was a large-scale national quality improvement collaborative that aimed to save an additional 1000 lives and prevent 50 000 episodes of harm in Welsh health care over a two year period. This research, published in the Journal of Communication in Healthcare, used the campaign as a case study to describe the development, application, and impact of a communications strategy embedded in a large-scale quality improvement initiative.