Exploring variation in quality of care and clinical outcomes between neonatal units: a novel use for the UK National Neonatal Audit Programme (NNAP)

[摘要] Neonatology is a relatively new specialty, in which much of the practice remains non-evidence based. Variation in the quality of care delivered is recognised but measuring this is challenging. One possible indicator of this is variation in practice. For more than a decade, the National Neonatal Audit Project (NNAP) has described variation in practice between UK neonatal units in relation to its annually reviewed audit measures. These are based on evidence based national standards or developed by a consensus method and have become de facto measures defining good quality of neonatal healthcare within the UK. In this article we explore the practicality of using the NNAP to look for associations between quality of care and outcomes. This would not be to validate the measures but could help towards a better understanding of the reasons underlying recognised variation in outcomes, even between neonatal units of the same designation.Healthcare quality improvementQuality measurementQuality improvement methodologieshttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits others to copy, redistribute, remix, transform and build upon this work for any purpose, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the licence is given, and indication of whether changes were made. See: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

[学科分类] 药学

[关键词] Healthcare quality improvement;Quality measurement;Quality improvement methodologies