Educational initiatives for health professionals to improve patient care are now an imperative for academic health settings in particular and all healthcare settings in general. This area of pedagogy requires an expert professoriate, and there is a developing literature on this topic.12 We propose the development of formal publication guidelines for this scholarly literature (box 1). This could contribute to its rigor and utility, and in turn, lead to better and more frequent publication of this literature in higher impact journals. Additional contributions from publication guidelines might also include improved research design and refined guidance for funding of such initiatives.

ADAPTING EXISTING RESEARCH PUBLICATION GUIDELINES TO EDUCATION REPORTS

Publication guidelines have been advanced with the aims of enhancing the rigor and utility of improvement research reports and defining clear expectations for authors, reviewers and editors.3^–5 One such draft set of guidelines—now called SQUIRE (Standards for Quality Improvement Reporting Excellence)—was published in Quality and Safety in Health Care56 and is undergoing a formal consensus process to sharpen the guidelines’ wording, and to broaden their acceptance and use. We suggest there may be insights to be learned and efficiencies to be …