The NICHQ-led Best Fed Beginnings initiative has made it possible for 218,000 more babies to be born in Baby-Friendly hospitals every year. This means that more moms receive breastfeeding education and support that adhere to “Baby-Friendly” criteria for care. Thus, families are empowered to make better-educated decisions about breastfeeding and follow-through on them all across the country. …
When a 2014 report showed one child almost every three days in Virginia died related to a preventable unsafe sleep environment, leaders at the Virginia Department of Health knew it was time to take action. “Everyone wants their baby to thrive, but too many people don’t know the risk factors and protective measures for safe…
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.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.