Explanation and Elaboration Overview

The importance of sharing accomplishments through the published literature is vital in every scientific field. Current reporting of improvement work in health care varies widely in both content and quality. It is against this backdrop that the Standards for QUality Improvement Reporting Excellence (SQUIRE) publication guidelines were created. The SQUIRE guidelines consist of a checklist of 19 items that authors should consider when writing articles that describe studies of quality improvement. Most of the items in the checklist are common to all scientific reporting, but virtually all of them have been modified to reflect the unique nature of medical improvement work.

These Explanation and Elaboration pages (E&E) are a companion to the SQUIRE guidelines. For each item in the SQUIRE guideline checklist, the E&E provides one or two examples from the published improvement literature, followed by an analysis of the ways in which the example expresses the intent of the guideline item. As with E&E documents created to accompany other biomedical publication guidelines, the purpose of the SQUIRE E&E is to assist authors along the path from completion of a quality improvement project to its publication.