Compassionate extubation protocol to improve team communication and support in the neonatal intensive care unit.

Objective: Compassionate extubation (CE) can be stressful for staff and families in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). Our quality improvement initiative developed and implemented a novel symptom management and family support checklist and post-debriefing template to improve team communication and staff support.

Study Design: An interprofessional team performed a needs assessment, determined key drivers and intervention steps, and implemented changes using Plan-Do-Study-Act cycles.

Attempting to Define Clinical Productivity Metrics among Pediatric Palliative Care Services at Academic Children's Hospitals.

Pediatric palliative care (PPC) programs have grown in size and number at academic children's hospitals in the United States for the past 20 years. Little is known about the relationships between program workforce staffing, billing and coding practices, clinical service requirements for billing providers, and sustainability of program models for billing providers. The authors contacted a convenience sample of 10 PPC program leaders at academic children's hospitals in the United States.