ABSTRACT
With sustainability, a related problem facing the Agency in 2001 concerned spreading ‘best practice’ more widely across the health service. Research has focused on the diffusion of product innovations in pursuit of company profitability, while innovations in working practices in public sector service settings, such as healthcare, have been overlooked. Related terms include adoption, transfer, dissemination, and assimilation of best practice, process redesign, good ideas, new working methods, and so on. In this volume, our usage has three features. First, from the following lists, any combination of terms on the left with terms on the right has the same meaning. The spread of new working methods, the adoption of innovation, and the transfer of best practice, are thus synonymous in the following treatment.
