Resident Quality Improvement Project: Improving the Discharge Process

Alicia Salas, MD

In an effort to improve the safety and health-care follow-up of our pediatric patients when they leave Maimonides Medical Center, residents have begun work on a quality improvement project  to optimize the hospital discharge process across our three pediatric inpatient units (PICU, NICU and Pediatric floor). 

Our current team consists of 7 pediatric residents (Regine Brioche, Susan Fraymovich,  Danijela Kero, Zaira Rivera-Diaz, Alicia Salas, Rothtida Srey, Adam Zaentz), and 2 faculty members (Shantanu Rastogi and Asha Willis). In the first cycle of our QI project, we identified 6 key components of the current discharge protocol and gathered data from patient charts over a 2-week period of time to examine whether or not these key tasks were being completed.

In the second phase of our project, we implemented our first intervention, conducting training sessions in each of our units to instruct the residency staff on how to correctly execute each task in the discharge process. We then gathered data following these training sessions to see if our intervention resulted in any measurable improvement. Our final phase, after analyzing the 2 groups of data, will be to introduce a Discharge Checklist to further improve completeness & adherence to the discharge protocol.