Past NIC/Q Collaboratives

NICQ 2009

NICQ 2009, the two year quality improvement collaborative for multidisciplinary NICU teams that began in January 2009 was the 6th in a series of intensive NICQ collaboratives sponsored by the Vermont Oxford Network. NICQ 2009 was comprised of multidisciplinary teams including parents from 53 NICUs and leadership teams from eight state groups that worked together for two years under the guidance of an expert faculty to fulfill this vision: "To be an inclusive Community of Practice that supports the pursuit of shared goals for improvement and the provision of exemplary care for all newborn infants and their families."

• Make measurable improvements in Quality & Safety
• Engage families as team members for improvement
• Foster a worldwide Community of Practice for newborn care in which knowledge, tools, and resources for improvement are developed, managed, shared, and applied.

NICQ 2007

NICQ 2007 began in January 2007 and was the 5th in a series of intensive improvement collaboratives sponsored by the Vermont Oxford Network. Interdisciplinary teams from 46 institutions in North America worked together for two years to improve the quality and safety of medical care for newborn infants and their families by focusing on 7 critical themes.

Six of the themes (safe, family centered, effective, efficient, timely, and equitable) were adapted from the Institute of Medicine' Aims, first published in Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century (IOM 2001). A seventh theme, socially and environmentally responsible, has been adopted by the Vermont Oxford Network for NICQ 2007.

NIC/Q 2005

NIC/Q 2005 was the fourth in a series of intensive face-to-face improvement collaboratives conducted by the Network and ran from January 2005 through December 2006. This group has two separate arms, YIN (Your Ideal NICU) for veteran centers and YANG for new and returning centers. The 12 centers involved in the YIN explored what an ideal NICU meant to them and steps for achieving it. The idea of the name YIN is that there is no one "ideal", each NICU must decide what is ideal for them and then work to achieve it. While continuing to build on the concepts learned through the NIC/Q project, this group of "pioneers " also explored the application of Microsystems thinking from the work of The Center for the Evaluative Clinical Sciences at Dartmouth Medical School. These 12 centers worked closely with experienced coaches and associate coaches from the Clinical Microsystems Resource and Development Group based at Dartmouth.

The 42 centers involved in YANG continued to build on the Four Key Habits. These centers were a combination of new and veteran NIC/Q collaborative members. All new centers have done work in Quality Improvement, either through their involvement in the iNICQ Internet Collaborative or the Quality and Safety Course. This group worked closely with experts, facilitators and clinical leaders in the following Exploratory Groups: Neonatal Pharmacy, Hemodynamics, Surgery, Respiratory Care, Nutrition, Physical Environment, and OB-Perinatal Care.

NIC/Q 2002

The NIC/Q 2002 Collaborative Project was comprised of 48 NICUs from across North America and ran from January 2002 through December 2004. In addition to improvement topics addressed in the earlier Collaboratives, multidisciplinary teams from participating centers explored improvement ideas in discharge planning, perinatology, nursing staffing, pain & sedation, infection, family-centered care, and respiratory care. Patient Safety continued to be an underlying theme throughout the Collaborative with emphasis on implementing the JCAHO patient safety goals in the neonatal population.

NIC/Q 2000

Thirty-four centers worked together from 1998 to 2001 in the Network's second improvement collaborative. Originally scheduled to end in 2000, the collaborative was extended for an additional year at the request of the participants to focus on patient safety and medical errors in response to the Institute of Medicine's landmark report, To Err is Human, Building a Safer Health Care System. Teams in NIC/Q 2000 identified and tested "potentially better practices" related to infection, chronic lung disease, brain injury, multidisciplinary teamwork, nutrition, family centered care and safety.

NIC/Q

The first NIC/Q improvement collaborative, named NIC/Q, included ten self-selected centers that worked together from 1995 to 1997. Teams from these centers pursued improvements in chronic lung disease, nosocomial infection, length of stay, and cost, which are described in three reference publications.