Quality and safety in the literature: January 2020

Healthcare quality and safety span multiple topics across the spectrum of academic and clinical disciplines. Keeping abreast of the rapidly growing body of work can be challenging. In this series, we provide succinct summaries of selected relevant studies published in the last several months. Some articles will focus on a particular theme, while others will highlight unique publications from high-impact medical journals. ### Key points Infection prevention and antimicrobial stewardship programmes are rapidly evolving.1 2 Like many patient safety initiatives, these programmes initially focused on encouraging the individual healthcare provider to follow guidelines, primarily through education, hand hygiene feedback and restricting use of higher-risk antibiotics. However, more recently there is recognition that infection prevention and antimicrobial …