Current Initiatives
Current LaPQC Initiatives
Through its initiatives, the Louisiana Perinatal Quality Collaborative (LaPQC) supports participating birthing facilities and pediatric clinics in their quality improvement efforts related to health outcomes immediately before and after birth. We accomplish this primarily through comprehensive, patient-centered, evidence-based, quality improvement programming.
Current Initiatives
The LaPQC has five active programs and initiatives, each one addressing a different area of perinatal or neonatal health outcomes:
- The Gift: seeks to improve maternal and infant outcomes related to breastfeeding and infant nutrition
- Safe Births Initiative: the primary home for Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Health (AIM) bundle implementation and perinatal outcomes work
- Improving Care for the Substance-Exposed Dyad: focuses on outcomes related to mother-child dyads affected by substance and opioid use disorder
- Caregiver Perinatal Depression Screening in Pediatric Clinics: seeks to understand and improve screening & referral pathways for caregivers affected by depression
- Community Birth Initiative: focuses on establishing policies, protocols, and procedures related to readiness, recognition, and response to obstetric and neonatal emergencies
- Obstetric Readiness in Emergency Departments: our initiative that supports Emergency Departments to improve readiness for obstetric emergencies.
All LaPQC initiatives have the following things in common:
- A focus on patient-centered care, considered from the start. Comprehensive approaches to reducing disparities have been an important part of LaPQC’s work since the beginning. It’s important for each initiative to address the unique patient needs and values in thoughtful and patient- and community-informed ways.
- Collaborative learning programming. The LaPQC team believes it’s just as important for participating improvement teams to learn from each other as it is to learn from state and national experts.
- A driver diagram and change package, grounded in evidence. All LaPQC initiatives share the same four core primary drivers – or areas of change we think will move this work forward: reliable clinical processes, respectful patient partnership, effective peer teamwork, and engaged perinatal leadership. In each of these four areas, teams implement best practices to improve outcomes.
- Meaningful measurement strategy. It is hard to know if you are improving if you don’t measure, so the LaPQC team constructs a comprehensive measurement strategy for each initiative so teams can track how they are doing, look for health disparities, and track progress toward goals.