Patient Safety

Safety Program in Perinatal Care-II Phase 2

• Co-PI:          Lilly Engineer, DrPH, MD, MHA
• Funder:       Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ)
• Status:         Ongoing

Starting in 2011, AHRQ designed, implemented, and evaluated the Safety Program for Perinatal Care (SPPC-I) in order to advance efforts to improve the patient safety culture of labor and delivery (L&D) units and decrease maternal and neonatal adverse events. The SPPC-I program’s design and implementation included three pillars – teamwork and communication, perinatal safety bundles, and in-situ simulations. The Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Health (AIM), an initiative to reduce maternal morbidity, also promotes the widespread adoption and implementation of its maternal safety bundles and 4-R framework: Readiness, Recognition & Prevention, Response, Reporting/Systems Learning. In turn, AHRQ SPPC-II is the continuation of the earlier work where teamwork and communication tools are being integrated into the AIM maternal safety bundles and associated program infrastructure.

This integration is occurring in two phases: Phase 1 (completed in September 2018) that yielded Draft SPPC-II Toolkit, Draft Field Test Plan, Draft Implementation Plan, and Draft Evaluation Plan; and Phase 2 (current 4-year project described here) that focuses on revising phase 1 tools, their field testing at 4 Johns Hopkins Health System facilities and finalizing those tools, as well as on implementation and evaluation of the integrated program. It is anticipated that evidence from the SPPC-II Phase 2 demonstration project in 2 states (over 200 hospitals) will allow for the continued uptake and spread of the SPPC-II Toolkit, its public availability for use by entities, and its wide dissemination to improve perinatal safety at the national level.