Phases of Improvement in the Child Safety Learning Collaborative Sudden Unexpected Infant Death Prevention Team

Full Description: The Children’s Safety Network (CSN) Child Safety Learning Collaborative (CSLC) brings state and jurisdiction health departments together to reduce infant, child, and adolescent fatalities, emergency department visits, and hospitalizations. The CSLC, guided by the CSN Framework for Innovation and Improvement, provides targeted training and technical assistance to states and jurisdictions to 1) build capacity to identify evidence-based and evidence-informed best practices 2) apply a systems approach to quality improvement that is based on using national, state, and local data to pilot, implement, and widely spread best practices, and 3) build leadership and management capacity to work within and across diverse organizations and settings with limited resources. One of the child safety topics the CSLC advances is the prevention of sudden unexpected infant death. From 2018 through today, seven states and jurisdictions focused on improving their state and jurisdiction wide sudden unexpected infant death prevention efforts through the CSLC. The states learned and/or applied various quality improvement strategies, including environmental scans, identifying gaps in their systems, forming partnerships, using qualitative and quantitative data to inform decision making, selecting and testing evidence-informed and evidence-based practices, and implementing and spreading practices widely. This poster will show the approaches, challenges, and progress made by states and jurisdictions, while looking at how they worked toward spreading and sustaining positive change in their evidence-based best practices. The poster will focus on how states tested and implemented their evidence-based practices through their engagement in the CSLC (The Improvement Guide, 2009). Though states and jurisdictions identified previous engagement with quality improvement and sudden unexpected infant death prevention efforts prior to joining the CSLC, many grappled with increased management and leadership needs and the efforts required to assess their environment, identify and build partnerships, and measure progress as they worked toward their ultimate goal of implementing and spreading best practices. CSN provided tailored technical assistance to meet the states where they were by building capacity to implement quality improvement tools and approaches and building a supportive and engaged peer learning environment. The CSLC creates an environment where cross-state learning can occur, where innovative solutions can be shared, and where states can coach one another on what has and has not worked in the past in their individual contexts. This poster will highlight how states and jurisdictions worked through the phases of improvement, how they measure progress, how they intend to continue to the next phase of improvement, and how they utilize continuous quality improvement methods with the end goal of achieving sustainable system improvements.

Abbreviated Description: The Child Safety Learning Collaborative (CSLC), led by the Children’s Safety Network (CSN) utilizes the CSN Framework for Innovation and Improvement to provide technical assistance to states working to reduce child and adolescent injury and violence. Seven states and jurisdictions tested and implemented evidence-based strategies to address sudden unexpected infant death prevention, including: training home visitors to assess infant sleep environments, implementing statewide communication campaigns, and training hospital staff on the best approaches to communicate with new caregivers while still in the hospital. This poster will highlight progress made by the states with the goal of moving towards widespread sustainable evidence-based practices.