Background: Improving the quality of care contributes to the Sustainable Development Goals. Nontechnical skills (NTS) such as leadership, teamwork, communication, and use of data for decisionmaking are the strong points of the learning process of collaboratives for quality improvement in health
services.
Objective: To evaluate the relationship between the collaboratives and the development of NTS by
participating health professionals.
Methods: We searched PUBMED, WEB OF SCIENCE, SCOPUS and GOOGLE SCHOLAR (the rst 30
pages) and performed a manual search on the IHI (Institute for Healthcare Improvement) website, from
Jan 2010 to Dec 2019, for articles published in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. IHI Breakthrough Series
Collaborative model project studies with pre- and post-data, and SQUIRE compliant titles were
included. The qualitative analysis evaluated the study design, year, country, context, target
for improvement, health services, duration of intervention, number of participating professionals,
evidence of improvement, effectiveness of the intervention, and NTS
Results: From 701 identied abstracts, 34 studies were included for data extraction and qualitative
analysis. Improvement of the intended results was reported by 76.5% (26/34), of which only 38.5%
(10/26) showed sustainability for six or more months. Improvement in NTS was assessed in ve studies,
but none assessed their contribution to the dissemination and sustainability of improvement.
Conclusions: Collaborative initiatives train professionals in improvement science to incorporate evidencebased practices. It is necessary to include, in the measurement plan of these improvement projects, the
assessment of the NTS acquired by the professionals and its relationship with the results achieved, the
dissemination level, and the success in terms of sustainability of those gains and best practices…more