The Seminar (held in June 2016) was designed to move away from simply debating and critiquing the rigor, attribution, and generalizability of improvement but rather move towards producing actionable knowledge around these topics.

 

This supplement brings together the findings from the seminar, articles included in this supplement. In addition to the editorial, the supplement is divided into the following papers, each addressing a key component of these discussions:

 

• ‘Quality Improvement and Emerging Global Health Priorities’ discusses the importance of improvement in addressing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs); achieving Global Health Coverage and combatting global health threats.

 

• ‘A framework for learning about improvement: embedded implementation and evaluation design to optimize learning’ presents and describes a framework and continuum developed by participants of the Salzburg Global Seminar Session 565 to better design and evaluate improvement. This paper concludes with a call for embedded evaluation and improvement—a key conclusion developed by session participants.

 

• ‘Unpacking the Black Box of Improvement’ discusses the importance of understanding what actually happens during an improvement intervention and what factors contributed to the success or failure of an improvement intervention. This paper highlights and analyses case studies discussed during the Salzburg Global Seminar Session 565 to ‘unpack’ the black box of improvement.

 

• ‘Adapting Improvements to Context: When, Why and How?’ analyses the role of context in contributing to the success or failure of improvement intervention. This paper discusses how, when and why improvement interventions can be adapted to work successfully within a given context.

 

• ‘Research versus Practice in Quality Improvement? Understanding How We Can Bridge the Gap’ uncovers the gap between researchers, evaluators and improvers in the field of improvement and how this gap can be bridged.

 

• ‘Practical Recommendations for the Evaluation of Improvement Initiatives’ summarizes the recommendations from the Salzburg Global Seminar Session 565. In particular, this paper discusses how embedded evaluation and improvement can be applied without compromising the integrity of the research and evaluation of the improvement.

 

• ‘Learning About Improvement to Address Global Health and Health care Challenges—Lessons and the Future’ is a high-level reflection paper on the Salzburg Global Seminar Session 565 as a whole. This paper emphasized the value of the thinking and insights from the session and their role in the future of global health.