OUH Newborn Intensive Care Unit rated “outstanding” in national audit programme
05/01/2023
This article is more than one year old.
The National Neonatal Audit Programme (NNAP) has identified the Newborn Intensive Care Unit of the John Radcliffe Hospital as outstanding for the “Deferred cord clamping” audit measure. Delaying clamping of the umbilical cord for at least one minute in very premature infants has been shown to reduce mortality by 30% for this population.
NNAP is a national clinical audit of care commissioned by the Health Quality Improvement Programme (HQIP) for all babies in the UK admitted to neonatal services and identifies variation in the provision of neonatal care at local unit, regional network and national levels.
This is the first year that NNAP has measured this process, and a “positive outlier status” which is what the Unit received, recognises a performance that is between 2-3 standard deviations (97.5 – 99.7%) above the average across all neonatal units in the UK. This project has been a joint quality improvement initiative between the neonatal and maternity teams, with collaborative working essential to achieving consistently high results for this measure.
Sam Foster, Chief Nursing Officer at OUH said: "I am pleased that our Newborn Intensive Care unit has been rated as outstanding in the national audit programme. This further shows that our maternity and neonatal teams are constantly improving the ways they work and care for vulnerable babies."
Anda Bowring, Advanced Neonatal Nurse Practitioner at OUH said: "It has been a great pleasure to work on the delayed cord-clamping quality improvement project with a team of enthusiastic champions across both maternity and newborn care. We set up lots of teaching and practice sessions as well as encouraging regular feedback on performance. This has all helped to embed this new practice which has such a significant benefit for our smallest and most vulnerable babies. We are hugely proud of the team and are now working to continue our excellent performance."
Pictured: The Optical Cord Management team. From left: Katy Hoare, Preterm Labour Midwife; Anda Bowring, Advanced Neonatal Nurse Practitioner; Eleri Adams, Consultant Neonatologist; Badri Shanmugam, Neonatal sister; Liz Hick, Senior midwife; Trisha Bohan, Senior midwife; and Sacha Ream, Lead Midwife for Maternity Education.