This Collaborative began in February 2006 and ended in June 2015.
To see upcoming programs related to this topic, please visit our Education page.
Today, global attention is focused on achieving the IHI Triple Aim — better health for individuals, better outcomes for more of the population, at a lower cost. For Labor and Delivery Units, this translates into increased attention on elective inductions, new mandatory reporting on the Perinatal Core Measure Set, and reversing the trend of rising Cesarean rates. In 2014-2015, the IHI Perinatal Improvement Community efforts will center on implementing structures and processes that will lead to improved outcomes in these three areas.
Watch a brief clip of a current Perinatal Improvement Community member describing her team's experience:
Members of the IHI Perinatal Improvement Community hosted a free call in January 2014 about Venous Thromboembolism (VTE) safety recommendations targeting maternal patients.
- Listen to this call's recording here
- Follow along with the call's slides here
- Review the OB VTE Safety Recommendations Tool here
More information about the call is available
here.
On June 25, 2013, IHI Perinatal Improvement Community faculty hosted a free informational call about the upcoming year.
Read answers to the questions posed in the chat on the June 25 call
The IHI Perinatal Improvement Community provides results-focused improvement opportunities to teams with a wide range of content and improvement experience. Participants start with in-depth diagnostic and goal-setting processes and identify initial areas of focus based on their expertise in the topic and in improvement. Teams engage in rapid testing of changes and process redesign that have been shown to improve care, adapting them to their own settings, and linking measurement to the outcomes.
Learning in the Perinatal Improvement Community takes place in a variety of settings:
- Virtual learning sessions bi-monthly on WebEx to gather expert knowledge, share information with colleagues, and plan action with your team
- Structured coaching calls occur monthly to get real-time feedback from trained improvement advisors and IHI staff and faculty. Team progress is also shared.
- Self-paced online resources to bolster your team’s learning
- Access to the Extranet, IHI’s private web-based work space, for sharing data and documents
- Listserv communication that is available all the time to all team members and faculty
- Two face-to-face meetings as a major opportunity for accelerated learning
The Challenge
Momentum is building across the country in the perinatal field -- there is no tolerance for elective delivery prior to 39 weeks gestation (misuse), elective induction (overuse), and support for spontaneous labor (underuse). A renewed focus on the cost of interventions to the mother and newborn and the outcomes these interventions contribute create is underway. Do your patients receive the care that your family member would--every day, every time?
Adverse events during labor and delivery can impose a heavy physical, psychological, and financial toll on the baby, family, care providers, and the community. Sound science that would allow us to deliver the best perinatal care is often known, yet is applied unreliably. Evidence-based guidelines for safe practices exist. The challenge is to ensure that these guidelines are applied to every patient, every time. Evidence-based care also relies on an effective, high functioning team, complemented by complete and accurate documentation of care provided.
This Community seeks to move to a model of shared multidisciplinary training and understanding in which all team members function together and are not afraid to speak up. When this happens reliably, adverse events have been shown to decrease as the system is now a learning system.
