Article Text
Abstract
Background In 2015, senior consultants at Sitaram Bhartia Institute of Science and Research saw several sick children in their outpatient clinics for which they had been seen in the emergency department the previous day. These children seemed to require admission but were sent home. This prompted us to review the paediatric care provided in our emergency department.
Methods A multidisciplinary team was formed to run this improvement initiative. Review of literature suggested that establishing a triage system around a prevalidated triage tool would help us deliver more appropriate care. The South African Triage Scale was selected and adapted.
Interventions With the aim of delivering appropriate care to at least 50% of children, a series of sequential interventions were tested using the improvement methodology of Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycles, an approach recommended by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. Learnings from the PDSA cycle of the previous intervention helped decide the subsequent change idea. The interventions included training in use of tool, increasing nurse staffing levels, using team huddles as feedback opportunities, introducing nurse reminders, reducing non-productive work, developing local leadership and training a restricted group of locum paediatricians. Qualitative and quantitative information was analysed to retain or reject change ideas.
Results At baseline only 16%–17% of children were receiving appropriate care. The sequential changes resulted in a gradual improvement to a median of 63% of children receiving appropriate care by the end of 20 months.
Conclusions We succeeded in establishing a paediatric emergency triage system and culture in the given setting through a unique enriching experience. We worked on removing systemic barriers and facilitating change while facing several unexpected outcomes. A sustained iterative approach may be the best way to achieving significant improvement in difficult settings like ours.
- quality improvement
- paediatrics
- emergency department
This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Supplementary materials
Supplementary Data
This web only file has been produced by the BMJ Publishing Group from an electronic file supplied by the author(s) and has not been edited for content.
Footnotes
Twitter @Saru4q
Contributors SB, NJ, JN and RW planned the original QI project, adapted and implemented the project and collected data. NJ drafted the paper with SB. All authors contributed to the manuscript and approved the final draft.
Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Competing interests None declared.
Patient and public involvement Patients and/or the public were not involved in the design, or conduct, or reporting, or dissemination plans of this research.
Patient consent for publication Not required.
Ethics approval This project was deemed to be an improvement project and not a study on human subjects. Therefore, ethical improvement was not required.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
Data availability statement All data relevant to the study are included in the article or uploaded as supplementary information.