Audit-and-Feedback and Workflow Changes Improve Emergency Department Care of Critically Ill Children

INTRODUCTION: Children with severe infection have improved outcomes when they received antibiotics promptly. Positive cultures help guide physicians in antibiotic selection. In 2011, 30% of children intubated in the emergency department received antibiotics and had respiratory culture collected within 60 minutes of intubation. Knowing the risk of delaying appropriate antibiotics, we charted a quality improvement team to improve compliance with 80% of intubated patients receiving both. METHODS: The team evaluated all children intubated with concern for infection in the emergency department. Using a multidisciplinary team and employing quality improvement methods, we implemented multiple plan-do-study-act cycles to improve time to antibiotics and respiratory cultures. The team continued to implement successful interventions and restarted interventions directly affecting improvement. RESULTS: While multiple interventions had small effects on the baseline of 30% compliance, 2 interventions appeared more influential than others. Workflow changes and audit-and-feedback created the largest, persistent positive changes. The importance of audit-and-feedback became very obvious when the project entered sustain mode. An abrupt decrease in compliance occurred when audit-and-feedback stopped. Complete recovery in compliance to greater than 80% occurred with the resumption of the audit-and-feedback intervention. CONCLUSIONS: Workflow changes and audit-and-feedback interventions resulted in large improvements. Loss of compliance with cessation of the audit-and-feedback and resumption demonstrated the importance of this intervention. Recovery to >80% compliance with the renewal of the audit-and-feedback program indicates its strength as a positive intervention.