Creating and sustaining a digital community of practice for quality improvement in South-East Asia during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Introduction: Ensuring quality of care in Low and Middle Income countries (LMICs) is challenging. Despite the implementation of various quality improvement (QI) initiatives in public and private sectors, the sustenance of improvements continues to be a major challenge. A team of healthcare professionals in India developed a digital community of practice (dCoP) focusing on QI which now has global footprints.

Implementing use of sucrose analgesia (non-pharmacological management of neonatal pain) in a standalone private facility level 3 neonatal care unit using point of care quality improvement methodology.

Background: Neonatal pain not only has negative impact on the acute physiological parameters of the neonate but also has got the potential to cause long-term neurodevelopmental disabilities. However, neonatal pain especially related to procedures is not well recognised and often poorly managed in neonatal intensive care unit (NICU).

Local Problem: Oral sucrose solution became available commercially in late 2017 and this provided us the opportunity to alleviate some of the procedural pain in neonates admitted in our NICU.