Pediatric Quality Improvement Engagement In The Community Setting

Abstract

Providing safe, high quality care to pediatric patients is a core goal for all healthcare systems. To this end, robust quality improvement and patient safety methodologies have been developed to improve pediatric patient care in academic medical centers. However, given that the majority of pediatric patients are first seen in emergency departments (EDs) in community hospitals rather than academic pediatric medical centers, there is an urgent need to adapt these methodologies to the community ED environment. In this review, we begin to address these issues by looking to successful quality improvement and patient safety initiatives for lessons that can be adapted to the unique challenges and opportunities encountered in community healthcare settings.