Conferences, tablecloths and cupboards: How to understand the situatedness of quality improvements in long-term care

► Creating improvements in care settings demands specific situating work, which can be conceptualized as translation. ► Gathering, materializing and training are inscriptions that play crucial roles in the sustainability of improvements. ► Sustaining quality improvement in healthcare settings needs alignment of work at different levels of care organizations. ► Patient work is inscribed in different ways in quality improvement with diverging consequences for performing choice. ► Ethnographic methods are essential to better understand the complex interactions of quality improvements in care settings.