Quality, safety, health reform: what’s best for the kids

Dozens of speakers at the NACHRI spring meeting, Creating Connections, are engaging representatives from children’s hospitals and related institutions in a vigorous dialogue this week on topics from quality and safety to health care reform, transparency, working in partnership and, in essence, doing what’s right for the kids.

Here are links to some slides from the more pertinent sessions:

Live It! Creating a Culture of Wellness in Schools — Tennessee is in the top ten! Unfortunately, it’s among states with the highest rates of obesity in both adults and children. Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt has been working for the past 4 years to reverse this trend through education to change behaviors of students, faculty and staff in Nashville Public Schools. Learn how a children’s hospital has organized a group of committed community partners to develop an effective, comprehensive school-based program.

Patient and Family-Centered Care: Finding the Evidence, Highlighting the Disparities — Practitioners know that patient and family-centered care is the ideal way to deliver pediatric service, but policy-level support generally requires hard evidence. The hospital convened a national summit, including 50 experts in family-centered care and research, to identify research priorities and develop an action plan to examine disparities related to the delivery of patient and family-centered care. The presenters will share the expert recommendations and subsequent outcomes that resulted from workgroups in research, evidence-based practice, measurement, core curricula and family partnerships.

Is the Family on Your Improvement Team? — Everyone, including families, has a role in making health care safe. Creating a truly effective partnership among family and staff is rewarding, yet challenging. Hear how to nurture family participation in your safety efforts, translate new information into actionable items, and evaluate the impact of family/clinician collaboration on the quality of patient care.

Transformational Journey: Academic Silos to Collaboration — Clinical Systems Improvement — Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center embarked on a transformational journey in 2001. The goal was nothing less than to reshape the way clinical professionals view their world and work. Clinical Systems Improvement (CSI) teams proved to be the catalyst in moving staff to a new mental model and new behaviors.

Initiating Improvement: Quality and Patient Safety — The Chairs Initiatives selected only those innovative quality and patient safety programs with considerable promise to improve health care outcomes in measurable and meaningful ways. Learn how the progress of these six initiatives is maintained through a collaborative process designed to support learning, accountability, cross-disciplinary work and measurable outcomes.

There were many, many more session discussions, but these are just some highlights to whet your appetite. As more than one person told me, the real value of these meetings is “creating connections” with peers, fellow soldiers in the battles to improve child health.

These are uncertain times. But one thing remains crystal clear: the dedication of these people is unwavering.