OBJECTIVE To assess influenza vaccination rates of healthcare workers (HCWs) in neonatal intensive care units (NICUs), pediatric intensive care units (PICUs), and oncology units in Pediatric Prevention Network (PPN) hospitals. PARTICIPANTS Infection control practitioners and HCWs in NICUs, PICUs, and oncology units. METHODS In November 2000, posters, electronic copies of a slide presentatio...

OBJECTIVE Validate risk-adjusted readmission rates as a measure of inpatient quality of care after accounting for outpatient facilities, using premature infants as a test case. STUDY SETTING Surviving infants born between January 1, 1998 and December 12, 2001 at five Northern California Kaiser Permanente neonatal intensive care units (NICU) with 1-year follow-up at 32 outpatient facilities. ...

BACKGROUND Most healthcare professionals in neonatal intensive care units typically focus on the infants and mothers; fathers often feel powerless and find it difficult to establish a father-child relationship. In family-centered healthcare settings, exploring fathers' experiences and needs is important because men's roles in society, especially as fathers, are changing. PURPOSE To describe f...

Patient and family experiences are important indicators of quality of care and little is known about how family accommodation affects hospital experience. We added questions about accommodation to standardized inpatient pediatric and neonatal intensive care unit family experience surveys at 10 U.S. hospitals to determine the accommodation types used by families, compare characteristics across a...

There are unique challenges to antimicrobial stewardship in neonatal intensive care units (NICUs). Diagnosis of infection is difficult as neonates can have nonspecific signs and symptoms. Between and within NICUs, significant variation exists in the treatment duration of suspected sepsis and pneumonia. Development of multidisciplinary teams and meaningful metrics are essential for sustainable a...

Human factors analysis (HFE) presents a formidable contribution to quality improvement (QI) in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). The science behind the fundamental principles concerning the design of work systems that match the needs of the people who work in them is sound and is applied widely in other safety critical situations. Early application of HFE in NICUs has shown the usefulnes...

OBJECTIVE To examine the effect of neonatal intensive care unit environmental characteristics (perceived levels of light and sound, and time of day) in open unit wards and single-family rooms (SFRs) on oral feeding outcomes in preterm infants. DESIGN Data were collected at each scheduled oral feeding for 87 preterm infants from the first oral feeding until discharge. Data included the prescri...

Copyright @ 2016 Authors. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly cited. Mohammed S. Alhussaini Department...

BACKGROUND Few measures of health related quality of life exist for use with preschool aged children. The objective of this study was to assess reliability and validity of a new multidimensional generic measure of health-related quality of life developed for use with preschool children. METHODS Cross-sectional survey sent to parents as their child turned 3 1/2 years of age. The setting was th...

AIM The aim of this study was to describe how parents experienced the support at, and preparation for discharge from, the NICU and how they experienced the first time at home. DESIGN A qualitative design with quantitative elements was applied. METHODS A questionnaire study. Data were analysed using qualitative content analysis with quantitative elements. RESULTS The majority of included p...