Learning about improvement to address global health and healthcare challenges-lessons and the future

This perspectives' paper highlights some of the learning from the seminar that the author considers to have particular relevance for improvement practitioners and for investigators seeking to maximize the usefulness of their investigations. The paper discusses the learning under four themes and also notes the future learning needed to enable faster and lower-cost improvement and innovative methods for this learning. The four themes are: describing and reporting improvement interventions; the theme of increasing our certainty about attributing effects to implemented improvement changes; the theme of generalizing the learning from one investigation or improvement and the theme of learning for sustainment and scale-up. The paper suggests ways to build on what we learned at the seminar to create and enable faster take up of proven improvements by practitioners and healthcare services so as to benefit more patients more quickly in a variety of settings.