Summary
- Evidence-based clinical and social practices are saving children’s lives and improving care around the world. Recent successes include co-designing for respectful care, accelerating pediatric cancer treatment, and increasing uptake of well-child visits.
“Safe care for every newborn and child” is the theme for the 2025 World Patient Safety Day. IHI joins with health care professionals around the globe to highlight the important work being done to improve health outcomes for children. We unite in action to prevent avoidable harm in pediatric care and to build a safer, healthier future for every child.
The impact of IHI’s projects aimed at improving health and care for newborns and children around the world includes measurable outcomes and improvements. We invite you to learn more about the work and the results.
National Preterm Birth Prevention Collaborative — Australia
Leaders in Australia have identified preterm birth as one of the highest priorities in contemporary health care. To address this, the Every Week Counts National Preterm Birth Prevention Program was initiated – the world’s first national program to safely reduce rates of preterm and early term birth. As a part of the program, the Australian Preterm Birth Prevention Alliance partnered with Women’s Healthcare Australasia, IHI, and organizations from each jurisdiction, including Safer Care Victoria, to convene the National Preterm Birth Prevention Collaborative. The collaborative uses IHI’s Breakthrough Series Collaborative model to support maternity services to test, refine, and implement evidence-based changes that lead to measurable results.
At an event to celebrate completion of the first round of the program last year, Professor John Newnham AM, Chair of the Alliance, shared that “the latest data from the program on rates of early term birth suggest a reduction of at least 10 percent, which equates to 4,000 fewer children each year being at increased risk of behavioral and learning problems at school age.” Full results of round one of the national collaborative will be published soon in a medical journal. The second round of the program is now in progress, with continued funding from the Australian Government Department of Health, Disability and Ageing. This phase includes a focused effort to provide culturally safe care for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families. With strong consumer involvement and a commitment to woman-centered care, this national initiative brings together clinicians, researchers, and communities to improve outcomes for mothers and babies across Australia.
Delivering More — Bangladesh, Ethiopia
The physical structure of health facilities impacts the delivery and experience of care, particularly for newborns and their mothers. Delivering More is a unique project focused on co-designing health facilities to enable safe and respectful maternal and newborn care in traditionally underserved populations. IHI led this work in Bangladesh and Ethiopia, in partnership with MASS Design Group.
The partners engaged with many groups impacted by care design — including mothers, companions, health care providers, facility staff, and Ministry of Health representatives — to ensure that design solutions would align with local contexts and reflect stakeholder needs. Local technical partners were trained in human-centered design methods, and designs were developed to meet the needs identified by stakeholders. To achieve widespread and sustainable improvements, the Delivering More Toolkit was created for anyone around the world who wants to learn how to adapt the design of their local health facility to meet their community’s unique needs.
The “Golden Hour” — Latin America: Mexico, Brazil, Haiti, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru
Since 2019, IHI has partnered with St. Jude Global to reduce treatment-related morbidity and mortality among children with cancer globally. The aim of this work was to increase the percentage of febrile pediatric hematology-oncology patients presenting to the emergency department who received their first dose of antibiotics within 60 minutes — the “Golden Hour” — across 85 hospitals from six Latin American countries.
This 60-minute time frame is an evidence-based best practice that has been shown to reduce incidence of sepsis and infection-related mortality, which were also measured in the project. The IHI Breakthrough Series Collaborative model was used, along with two certified improvement science capability-building programs and other IHI methods and tools. The remarkable results include an increase in patients receiving the first dose of antibiotics within 60 minutes from a baseline of 47 percent to 75 percent, a decrease in incidence of sepsis from a mean of 15 percent to 6 percent, which resulted in an estimated 347 cases of sepsis prevented, an estimated 5,458 inpatient bed days reduced, an estimated $8 to $10 million in avoided costs and, more importantly, an estimated 27 deaths avoided.
Child Health Equity Collaborative — United States
Receiving well-child care is crucial to getting a healthy start in life. The Child Health Equity Collaborative is addressing this need, bringing together all Medi-Cal managed care plans in California to improve well-child visit (WCV) rates in infants and adolescents. The virtual collaborative is run by IHI and funded by California’s Department of Health Care Services. The Center for Care Innovations (CCI) is an implementation partner in this important work.
Phase One, which focused on using data to drive equity in children’s health care, was completed in June 2025, and Phase Two kicked off in September. Change ideas being tested include enhancing appointment access and scheduling, connecting Medi-Cal members to resources to support WCV completion, and connecting families to patient navigation services.
Advancing Safer Newborn Care – Ethiopia
For 12 years, IHI has partnered with Ethiopia’s Ministry of Health (MOH) to reduce neonatal mortality through a whole-system quality approach focused on three pillars: establishing a national quality and safety strategy to embed a culture of continuous improvement; building the capability of health care leaders and providers on improvement science; and implementing changes at both local and system levels to reduce perinatal and maternal mortality. As one of the directors at MOH noted, “IHI works at the grassroot level with co-designed, outcome-focused interventions.”
This collaboration has yielded significant results. The Ethiopian Health Care Quality Initiative (2016-2022) was implemented in 40 percent of the country’s districts, using the WHO safe childbirth checklist to improve essential care delivery as part of the district-wide maternal and newborn health quality improvement. The project achieved a 70 percent increase in newborn care bundle compliance, a 55 percent increase rise in postnatal care coverage, and a 51 percent reduction in neonatal mortality in a subset of facilities. Building on this success, the Networks of Care Project (2022-2025) has shown a 30 percent reduction in perinatal mortality. This project provided a new model for district-level health care delivery, promoting efficient resource use and improved collaboration among facilities. IHI plans to scale-up those initiatives to help Ethiopia meet its sustainable development goals.
Evidence-Based Consulting and Partnership Success
IHI’s approach to consulting and partnerships is grounded in the science of improvement, using practical, evidence-based methods and tools — tested and honed over three decades — to enable sustainable changes in health and health care. We pair deep contextual knowledge of our partners’ needs with the rich expertise of our staff and faculty who have experience with similar work across the world. In so doing, we bring the best of IHI and our partners who are pioneers in health systems innovation and transformation to each engagement. We have worked in 62 countries across six continents, tailoring our consulting and implementation support to diverse health systems and cultural contexts. Together with our partners, we are helping to improve health and care around the world, one child at a time.
Photo by Magnifier Creatives
You may also be interested in:
- Maternal and Infant Health improvement topic page
- Learn more about IHI’s consulting and partnerships services
- Read case studies about who we help
- See where we work using an interactive map