2010 Annual Meeting and Quality Congress 
Save these dates! Our 2010 Annual Meeting and 11th Annual Quality Congress has been scheduled for December 4 and 5th in Washington, DC. Our meetings provide an
opportunity for health professionals to hear talks by nationally known experts in their fields as well as engage in plenary presentations, interactive workshops, a learning fair and much more. Register Now!
Click here to view/listen to the 2009 Annual Meeting presentations
Click here to view/listen to the 2009 Quality Congress presentations
NEW NICQ 2007 eBook available
We are pleased to present the eBook entitled "NICQ 2007: Improvement in Action".
This ebook is the culmination of NICQ 2007, a two-year improvement collaborative involving teams of neonatal professionals and families representing 46 hospitals in North America.
This book is available to download in it's entirety or by chapter. Learn more . . .
New Growth Category in Nightingale
A new growth category has been added to Nightingale.
Measures include average weight in grams at initial disposition, growth velocity, and head growth at initial disposition. Go to
the Nightingale home page to learn more.
Maintenance of Certification
The American Board of Pediatrics has recently approved several of the Vermont Oxford Network Collaboratives, both NICQs and iNICQs,
as a source of credit for Maintenance of Certification, Part 4. Learn more and review detailed criteria
for submission . . . . .
Spring Newsletter
Get the schedule for the upcoming iNICQ and NICQ sessions and the 2010 Annual Meeting and Quality Congress!
Plus, learn the latest about VON’s Addis Ababa Black Lion Project and the Neonatal Encephalopathy Registry.
Meet the latest members of the Database Advisory Board and hear what happened at the last Annual Meeting.
And more . . .
A Community of Practice
This article, The Vermont Oxford Network: A Community of Practice, authored by the Directors of the Vermont Oxford Network was published in the March 2010
issue of Clinics in Perinatology titled, Quality Improvement in Neonatal and Perinatal Medicine, guest
editors, Alan R. Spitzer, MD and Dan Ellsbury, MD. The article concludes: “... that the neonatology
community is an evolving worldwide community of practice in which health professionals and families around
the world are engaged in collective learning about our shared domain of human endeavor, providing
high-quality and safe care to newborn infants and their families. The Vermont Oxford Network looks forward
to providing the tools and resources to help this community of practice continue to grow and flourish.”
The full text of this article is available here.
The NICQ 2009 Quality Improvement Collaborative
Highlights of the NICQ 2009 meeting in Austin, TX included: an interactive session on Improvement Methods presented by Lloyd Provost; a ‘Texas Scramble’
which provided cross Topic Group interaction, further enhanced by a poster and video learning fair with sharing of improvement stories and measurement
strategies; several interesting concurrent workshop offerings; and an update on the ever evolving NICQpedia
website. The final meeting of NICQ 2009 will convene in Minneapolis September 24-27 and include a Senior Leader Invitational.
Learn more . . .
The 2010 iNICQ Collaborative
The Vermont Oxford Network is currently offering its 10th iNICQ Internet Collaborative, Controversies in Neonatal Intensive Care.
The series includes six ninety minute web sessions designed to assist multidisciplinary NICU improvement teams in making measurable improvements in the care they provide.
Learn more . . .
We recommend the Cochrane Neonatal Review Group (CNRG)
as a great resource for our members.
The CNRG
is one of over 50 collaborative review groups of the Cochrane Collaboration.
The CNRG produces and disseminates evidence-based, regularly updated reviews of the effects of therapies in
neonatal-perinatal medicine. The CNRG is funded by The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (USA)
which maintains an Internet archive of the neonatal reviews.
Mission:
The mission of the Vermont Oxford Network is to improve the quality and safety
of medical care for newborn infants and their families through a coordinated
program of research, education and quality improvement projects.
A Network of Neonatal Professionals
The Vermont Oxford Network is a non-profit voluntary collaboration of health
care professionals dedicated to our mission. Established in 1988, the Network
is today comprised of over 800 Neonatal Intensive Care Units around the world.
Principles for Accepting Commercial Support
The Vermont Oxford Network has adopted formal guidelines for the acceptance of
commercial support. These guidelines are outlined in the following document,
Principles for
Accepting Commercial Support
Policy and Guidelines for Collaborative Research with the Vermont Oxford Network
Database
The Vermont Oxford Network has approved
policy and guidelines
which govern access to the data in the VON databases for research.