Speaking and listening: The importance of stakeholder engagement in quality improvement in pediatric urology.

To improve health care, we as clinicians must work to change processes that make it easier to do our job well and reliably every day. Before improving a process, we must understand it and this often requires employing the expertise of others. Indeed, quality improvement work is often done in teams. The key is identifying and engaging the right stakeholders for each improvement initiative. The goal of this review is to provide health care professionals with the basis for how to do this. We describe four essential stakeholder steps that aid in the success of a quality improvement initiative. The steps of 1.) identifying and 2.) categorizing stakeholders involve spending the time to think about who the necessary stakeholders are and how to organize them. It is essential to consider stakeholders who are balanced for expertise, skills, experience, perspective, gender, race, and ethnicity. The process then moves on to 3.) analyzing stakeholders, which supports efforts that are focused on the stakeholder relationships that will most impact project success. The final step is 4.) stakeholder engagement. This represents a critical opportunity, not only upfront, but also to maintain a high level of stakeholder engagement throughout the quality improvement project. As the improvement work evolves, it is important to return to the earlier steps and reflect on the stakeholder group; the process is iterative. Devoting sufficient energy and time to these stakeholder steps will provide ample returns. This review should assist health care professionals in establishing an improvement team for each quality improvement initiative, which is foundational to initiating change efforts that better system performance, enhance the quality of care, and ensure patient safety.

Enhanced Recovery After Surgery for an Uncommon Complex Urological Procedure: The Complete Primary Repair of Bladder Exstrophy.

PURPOSE: ERAS (enhanced recovery after surgery) protocols are designed to optimize perioperative care and expedite recovery. Historically, complete primary repair of bladder exstrophy has included postoperative recovery in the intensive care unit and extended length of stay. We hypothesized that instituting ERAS principles would benefit children undergoing complete primary repair of bladder exstrophy, decreasing length of stay. We describe implementation of a complete primary repair of bladder exstrophy-ERAS pathway at a single, freestanding children's hospital. MATERIALS AND METHODS: A multidisciplinary team developed an ERAS pathway for complete primary repair of bladder exstrophy, which launched in June 2020 and included a new surgical approach that divided the lengthy procedure into 2 consecutive operative days. The complete primary repair of bladder exstrophy-ERAS pathway was continuously refined, and the final pathway went into effect in May 2021. Post-ERAS patient outcomes were compared with a pre-ERAS historical cohort (2013-2020). RESULTS: A total of 30 historical and 10 post-ERAS patients were included. All post-ERAS patients had immediate extubation (P = .04) and 90% received early feeding (P < .001). The median intensive care unit and overall length of stay decreased from 2.5 to 1 days (P = .005) and from 14.5 to 7.5 days (P < .001), respectively. After final pathway implementation, there was no intensive care unit use (n=4). Postoperatively, no ERAS patient required escalation of care, and there was no difference in emergency department visits or readmissions. CONCLUSIONS: Applying ERAS principles to complete primary repair of bladder exstrophy was associated with decreased variations in care, improved patient outcomes, and effective resource utilization. Although ERAS has typically been utilized for high-volume procedures, our study highlights that an enhanced recovery pathway is both feasible and adaptable to less common urological surgeries.

Experience with implementation of a nurse practitioner-led newborn circumcision clinic.

INTRODUCTION/BACKGROUND: The Nurse Practitioner (NP)-Led Newborn Circumcision Clinic (NCC), developed in 2016, provides clamp-style circumcision to newborns without general anesthesia. There is a paucity of research regarding outcomes, satisfaction, and the cost benefit of such NP-led clinics. OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this descriptive study was to describe the impact of the NCC including family satisfaction, clinical and demographic characteristics, and cost. STUDY DESIGN: This study utilized a mixed-method approach to describe the impact of the NP-led NCC using survey methodology to describe family satisfaction, a single center retrospective chart review to describe clinical and demographic characteristics and outcomes, and investigation of charges in NCC versus operating room (OR) circumcisions. Descriptive statistics were used to present survey results and chart review data. RESULTS: Results of the patient satisfaction survey revealed 89.8% of patients rated the overall quality of care as excellent or very good. Of the 234 patients reviewed, the median age and weight of patients was 4.30 weeks and 4.39 kg, respectively. Of the patients with comorbidities (30.3%), the most common were related to prematurity (12.8%). The most common reason for referral was concern for anatomical abnormality of the penis (53.8%). The median length of procedure was 20 minutes. No patients in our cohort experienced penile amputations, infections, strictures, intraoperative bleeding, or wounds. Ten patients (4.3%) had bleeding events during the recovery period which were treated with a topical medication (StatSeal). Two patients (0.9%) had bleeding after discharge requiring Emergency Department evaluation and application of a pressure dressing. Two patients (0.9%) required circumcision revision. Investigation of charges revealed a savings of 92.9% for circumcisions in the NCC versus OR. DISCUSSION: This study reveals that the NP-led NCC has high family satisfaction, few adverse outcomes, and cost benefits as compared to OR circumcision. There are a limited number of publications presenting outcome data for circumcisions and even fewer for NP- led circumcision clinics. Furthermore, a lack of standardized definitions for adverse events makes comparison difficult. CONCLUSIONS: Critical to the success of the NP-led NCC is appropriately selecting patients, a NP training program, and intra-professional collaboration. This ambulatory clinic offers another option for select infants who were not immediately circumcised in the newborn period. By expanding opportunities for NPs to practice to the full extent of their education and expertise, our institution continues to develop opportunities to improve access to care, control costs, and increase patient and family satisfaction.