Coming Together to Save Babies: Our Institution’s Quality Improvement Collaborative to Improve Infant Safe Sleep Practices

Many hospitalized infants are not observed in an American Academy of Pediatrics-recommended safe sleep environment, which can translate to unsafe sleep practices at home. We implemented this collaborative to reduce our county’s sleep-related death rate by improving infant safe sleep practices in the freestanding children’s hospital setting and increasing safe sleep screening and education in our clinics and emergency departments (EDs). METHODS: Physicians from our institution’s primary care clinics, EDs, neonatal intensive care units, and general inpatient units created and led multidisciplinary safe sleep teams. Teams have used standardized data tools to collect information on infant patient ages and sleep position and environment, both in the hospital and at home. Based on audit data, teams have implemented multiple Plan-Do-Study-Act cycles during this collaborative. We have calculated changes in safe sleep practices in the hospital and changes in screening and education on safe sleep behaviors over time. RESULTS: Our teams have significantly increased compliance with safe sleep practices in the inpatient and neonatal intensive care unit settings (P < 0.01). We have also increased screening and education on appropriate safe sleep behaviors by ED and primary care providers (P < 0.01). Our county’s sleep-related death rate has not significantly decreased during the collaborative. CONCLUSIONS: Our collaborative has increased American Academy of Pediatrics-recommended safe sleep practices in our institution, and we decreased sleep-related deaths in our primary care network. We have created stronger ties to our community partners working to decrease infant mortality rates. More efforts will be needed, both within and outside of our institution, to lower our community’s sleep-related death rate.