Risk-adjusted intraventricular hemorrhage rates in very premature infants: towards quality assurance between neonatal units.

Background: The incidence of intraventricular hemorrhage (IVH) in very low birth weight infants can be used as an index of the quality of care in neonatal intensive care units as long as it is adjusted to reflect the infants' risk profiles on admission to the unit, which may vary systematically from one institution to another. Adjustment for gestational, birth-related, and neonatological risk factors enables a fair comparison of IVH rates across neonatal intensive care units.

Methods: Data on 1782 neonates born at less than 32 weeks of gestation or weighing less than 1500 g at birth were retrieved from the 26 744 anonymous data sets collected in the Peri- and Neonatal Survey of the German state of Saxony in the years 2001-2005.

[Risk-adjusted assessment of neonatology wards by the new quality indicator "transfer rate of mature newborns"].

Objective: 1. The transfer rate of mature newborns will be presented as a new quality indicator. 2.

[Risk-adjusted assessment: late-onset infection in neonates].

Objective: The weak point of the countrywide perinatal/neonatal quality surveillance is the ignorance of interhospital differences in the case mix of patients. As a result, this approach does not produce reliable benchmarking. The objective of this study was to adjust the result of the late-onset infection incidence of different hospitals according to their risk profile of patients by multivariate analysis.