PQCs: Enhancing the quality of care for mothers and babies, one State at a time (21 September 2020)

Summary

Ensuring quality of care during pregnancy and childbirth is crucial to improving health outcomes and reducing preventable mortality and morbidity among women and their newborns. In recent years, Perinatal Quality Collaboratives (PQCs) have been driving improvements in perinatal care across the United States.

PQCs are state or multistate networks of teams working to improve the quality of care for mothers and babies. PQCs do that by advancing evidence-informed clinical practices and processes using quality improvement principles to address gaps in care. PQCs work with clinical teams, experts and stakeholders, including patients and families, to spread best practices, reduce variation and optimise resources to improve perinatal care and outcomes. The goal of PQCs is to achieve improvements in population-level outcomes in maternal and infant health.

In this article, LifeQI outlines the PQC approach, tools LifeQI can offer and some examples of PQCs being run. Life QI is the global web platform where tools, people and data come together to make improvement happen.