Success in Change Management: The Flexibility Factor
Flexibility plays a central role in one of the key aspects of sustained improvement: empowering team members to generate ideas and to test and implement successful changes.
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Family Partners Help Create Sustainable Change
Parents of children with special health needs become experts on their children’s condition in a way that doctors and administrators cannot. Their countless hours on the front line, navigating the healthcare system and other community resources, gives them invaluable insight into how these systems work (and do not work) for them. That is why NICHQ…
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Setting the Stage for Sustainability in Quality Improvement Projects
In all types of quality improvement efforts, sustainability is a vital consideration that often goes overlooked until the project’s final stages. With the right balance of foresight and strategy, however, team leaders can plan for sustainability as a project gets underway. This lets teams seamlessly support sustainability and a create quality improvement projects with truly…
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Collaborative Approach Helps Minnesota Accelerate Improvement
Many vital systems, such as the lungs and brain, complete their development during a baby’s last weeks of gestation. So, when a baby is born preterm (before 37 weeks) there is an increased risk of health-related complications and infant mortality. Because nearly 1 in 10 babies is born preterm in the United States, reducing preterm births is…
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Results of NICHQ Breastfeeding Initiative Featured in Pediatrics Journal
A report on the highly successful NICHQ-led Best Fed Beginnings initiative is featured in the June online edition of the prestigious Pediatrics journal. The piece, “Best Fed Beginnings: A Nationwide Quality Improvement Initiative to Increase Breastfeeding,” features insights and analysis on the initiative’s major achievements, including driving 80 percent of participating hospitals to achieve “Baby-Friendly” status. Starting…
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NYS Builds Unlikely Partnership to Promote Safe Infant Sleep
New York State (NYS) has reduced its infant mortality rate from 5.99 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2002, to 4.5 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2014. But if you ask leaders in NYS, there is still room for improvement. In 2014, approximately 100 infants died suddenly or unexpectedly in NYS. These sudden unexpected…
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The Baby Box: An Opportunity, Not A Magic Bullet
In the past few months, you may have seen increasing attention around the use in the U.S. of Finnish baby boxes to promote safe sleep environments. Some are hailing it as the solution to the U.S. infant mortality problem. But, the circumstances around the success of baby boxes in Finland are much different than in…
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How to Avoid the Most Common Pitfalls in Planning PDSA Cycles
After nearly 20 years of guiding teams in constructing PDSA cycles we’ve identified three common pitfalls. The good news is you can easily avoid them.
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Family Engagement: Identifying the Right Parent Partners for Improvement Work
The end goal at NICHQ is to achieve better health outcomes for children. To achieve that, we engage parents and families as partners on the improvement journey, because we know that changing a system requires involving those that the system most affects. “We know that parents have perspectives, insights and connections that stakeholders in public health can’t…
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Strategies for How to Align CoIIN and Public Health Accreditation Activities
Accreditation for health departments has been implemented to standardize the assessment and measurement of performance of public health departments at the state, local and tribal levels. Current efforts and initiatives like the Collaborative Improvement & Innovation Network to Reduce Infant Mortality (Infant Mortality CoIIN) often intersect with state efforts to submit accreditation applications, allowing public…