Improving Patient Care: The Implementation of Change in Clinical Practice

Edited by R Grol, M Wensing, M Eccles. Oxford: Elsevier, 2005, pp 290. Imagine you received a large grant to create a new guideline on diabetes, and the grant included money to facilitate the use of the guideline in your city. After 3 years, you find that < 20% of doctors who participated in the study actually used the new guideline. What happened? Chances are, you have run into a problem of implementing change in clinical practice. Grol, Wensing and Eccles have written a book to help readers reflect on clinical practice, evidence and behaviour change. Research evidence begs for many behaviour changes in clinical practice to improve patient care, but habits are hard to break even when the evidence is within easy reach. The first few chapters of this book provide an intriguing summary of the literature on behaviour change from many disciplines. Their overviews of these theories are excellent, …