Quality of Neonatal Intensive Care and Outcome for High Risk Newborn Infants

Abstract

It is generally accepted that outcome is related at least in part to the quality of care and therefore the quality of care delivered to babies should be closely monitored in order to improve outcome. Quality in neonatal care is a complex subject, but improving and developing the quality of care is a goal to which all neonatologists should aspire. In order to achieve incremental improvement in quality of care, these outcomes need to be monitored ongoing interim measures need to be implemented in order to improve care such as audit, benchmarking and confidential enquiries, which are discussed below. Traditional measures of outcome such as death, neurodevelopmental status and chronic lung disease are also discussed in detail later in this chapter. Improving quality of care can additionally be achieved by implementing modern, effective, evidence based methods of knowledge translation in order to increase the use of evidenced based health care.