Using quality improvement to optimise paediatric discharge efficiency.

Background: Bed capacity management is a critical issue facing hospital administrators, and inefficient discharges impact patient flow throughout the hospital. National recommendations include a focus on providing care that is timely and efficient, but a lack of standardised discharge criteria at our institution contributed to unpredictable discharge timing and lengthy delays. Our objective was to increase the percentage of Hospital Medicine patients discharged within 2 h of meeting criteria from 42% to 80%.

Utilizing improvement science methods to improve physician compliance with proper hand hygiene.

Objective: In 2009, The Joint Commission challenged hospitals to reduce the risk of health care-associated infections through hand hygiene compliance. At our hospital, physicians had lower compliance rates than other health care workers, just 68% on general pediatric units. We used improvement methods and reliability science to increase compliance with proper hand hygiene to >95% by inpatient general pediatric teams.