Practical quality improvement changes for a low-resourced pediatric unit.

Background: This work describes a sustainable and replicable initiative to optimize multi-disciplinary care and uptake of clinical best practices for patients in a pediatric intensive care unit in Low/Middle Income Countries and to understand the various factors that may play a role in the reduction in child mortality seen after implementation of the Quality Improvement Initiative.

Methods: This was a longitudinal assessment of a quality improvement program with the primary outcome of intubated pediatric patient mortality. The program was assessed 36 months following implementation of the quality improvement intervention using a -test with linear regression to control for co-variates.

Sustainable improvement in upstream and downstream outcomes for intubated patients three years after an airway-based educational intervention in a low-resource pediatric intensive care unit.

Objective: To determine whether implementation of an education-based intervention can sustainably improve upstream and downstream outcomes in intubated patients in a pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) in a low-resource country.

Design: Quality improvement study comparing airway-related morbidity in two previously studied patient cohorts pre-intervention (Epoch 1) and immediately post-intervention (Epoch 2) with a third cohort thirty-six months post-intervention (Epoch 3).

Setting: PICU of the largest public children's hospital in El Salvador.