SQUIRE 2.0 (Standards for QUality Improvement Reporting Excellence): Revised Publication Guidelines from a Detailed Consensus Process

Abstract

*This paper is co-published in BMJ Quality and Safety. Our goal in publishing the SQUIRE 2.0 guidelines concurrently with BMJ and other journals is to ensure that this important information is disseminated to a wider audience. Minor differences exist between this version and the others to be consistent with AJMQ editorial style. AbstractIn the past several years, the science of health care improvement has advanced considerably. In this article, we describe the development of SQUIRE 2.0 and its key components. We undertook the revision between 2012 and 2015 using (1) interviews and focus groups to evaluate SQUIRE 1.0 plus feedback from an international steering group, (2) faceto-face consensus meetings to develop interim drafts, and (3) pilot testing with authors and a public comment period. SQUIRE 2.0 emphasizes 3 key components of systematic efforts to improve the quality, value, and safety of health care: formal and informal theory in planning, implementing, and evaluating improvement work; the context in which the work is done; and the study of the intervention(s). SQUIRE 2.0 is intended for reporting the range of methods used to improve health care, recognizing that they can be complex and multidimensional. It provides common ground to share these discoveries in the scholarly literature (www.squire-statement.org).

Social prescribing: less rhetoric and more reality. A systematic review of the evidence

“…Reporting guidelines such as Standards for QUality Improvement Reporting Excellence (SQUIRE)38 with its focus on explaining ‘Why did you start?’, ‘What did you do?’, ‘What did you find?’ and ‘What does it mean?’ could readily be applied to ensure that learning is systematically captured in a generalisable format. This in turn would serve to ensure that any future decisions relating to the continuation or wider spread of social prescribing schemes are transparent and evidence informed.…”

Balancing measures or a balanced accounting of improvement impact: a qualitative analysis of individual and focus group interviews with improvement experts in Scotland

“…Few improvement reports mention unintended consequences, despite the Standards for Quality Improvement Reporting Excellence (SQUIRE) guidance14 including a requirement that reporting should include ‘ unintended consequences, such as unexpected benefits, problems, failures or costs associated with the intervention’ (standard 13e). Of note though is that the SQUIRE explanation and elaboration for this standard51 focuses more on exploring variation in implementation effectiveness and does not provide any examples of significant elaboration of unintended consequences.…”

A scoping review of online repositories of quality improvement projects, interventions and initiatives in healthcare

“…While some types of practice information were common across all repositories (eg, title of practice, location), other types varied across repositories (eg, dates of entry, contact information, quality of evidence). In contrast to recommendations for reporting on QI for scholarly publications,11 which emphasises the need to provide basic information on the context/setting for QI practices, most of the QI repositories provided only limited contextual information.…”

“…However, as can be expected with any nascent effort, the approaches to structuring, organising and sharing information on QI practices vary widely among such repositories. Despite thoughtful efforts to develop standards and guidelines for scholarly reporting of QI, such as SQUIRE,7 11 and the emergence of dedicated peer-reviewed journals for QI reporting, such as BMJ Quality Improvement Reports,12 there has been less attention directed towards routine capturing of QI efforts by and for non-academic audiences.…”