Award Recognizes Improvement in Care of High-Risk Infants

Vermont Oxford Network Award for Excellence in Quality Improvement honors select hospitals for NICU projects.

BURLINGTON, Vt., Dec. 4, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Six hospitals have been awarded the inaugural Vermont Oxford Network Award for Excellence in Quality Improvement. The selective award recognizes hospitals that demonstrate dedication to multidisciplinary, structured quality improvement in the care of infants and families.

Multidisciplinary care teams studied quality improvement fundamentals and applied those methods to advance projects within the VON quality improvement collaborative All Care is Brain Care. In addition to submitting a presentation about their work, teams were required to include a family partner on the quality improvement team, meet with senior leadership about the improvement project, and demonstrate quality improvement performance through identifying a SMART aim, applying formal QI methods, and measuring results.

"Congratulations to the recipients of the 2024 Vermont Oxford Network Award for Excellence in Quality Improvement," said Dr. Jeffrey Horbar, Vermont Oxford Network President and CEO. "The six awardees have demonstrated how interdisciplinary newborn care teams, including parents as working members, with support from organizational leadership, can apply quality improvement science to improve the health and well being of the infants and families we serve."

The six teams are:

• Duke Children's in Durham, N.C., honored for their work to standardize delayed umbilical cord clamping.
• Helen DeVos Children's Hospital in Grand Rapids, Mich., honored for their work to increase the number of infants receiving skin-to-skin care within the first 72 hours of life.
• Lankenau Medical Center in Wynnewood, Pa., honored for their work to reduce rates of severe IVH and improve time to skin-to-skin care.
• Lucile Packard Children's Hospital Stanford in Palo Alto, Calif., honored for their work decreasing the time between birth and when "kangaroo care" is implemented. Kangaroo care, also known as skin-to-skin care, supports the developmental health of infants, among other benefits.
• Memorial Hermann Memorial City Medical Center in Houston, Texas, honored for their work to improve rates of infants discharged home receiving breastmilk, which is important for gut-health, life-long bonding with the mother, and other benefits.
• Peyton Manning Children's Hospital in Indianapolis, Ind., honored for their work to improve rates of survival and decrease the severity and frequency of lifelong conditions for infants born <27 weeks gestation.

The teams advanced their quality improvement projects by adhering to the VON core values of measuring for data-driven decisions, implementing evidence into practice, partnering with families, promoting health equity, and collaborating with others. In the All Care is Brain Care quality improvement collaborative, the teams accessed interactive toolkits of evidence-based potentially better practices to support their quality improvement processes. VON refers to improvement ideas as "potentially better practices" rather than "better" or "best" practices to indicate that each practice must be adapted, tested, and shown to work in the local context. The teams tested the improvement ideas in their units with the guidance of VON faculty and other quality improvement educational resources and custom measurement tools.

The awarded hospitals will share their stories of improvement on the VON website and with other teams who are part of the worldwide improvement community as work that shows dedication to the principles of quality improvement in the care of infants and families.

About Vermont Oxford Network
Vermont Oxford Network (VON) is a nonprofit worldwide community of health care professionals dedicated to improving the quality, safety, and value of care for newborn infants and their families through a coordinated program of data-driven quality improvement, education, and research. Members use confidential information from the world's largest and most comprehensive databases of infant data to benchmark their practices and outcomes and identify areas for improvement. Teams from around the world address critical and complex challenges of newborn care with evidence-based quality improvement methods guided by VON expert faculty and resources. www.vtoxford.org.

Contact:
Drew Arnold
VON Marketing & Communications Manager
[email protected] | 802.488.8025 ext. 225

SOURCE Vermont Oxford Network (VON)