Quality and Outcomes

Quality and Outcomes

Best and Safest Care

Children’s Wisconsin is committed to providing the best and safest care. We believe these factors define the best and safest care or quality.

  • Safe: Preventing injuries from the care that is meant to help.
  • Timely: Ensuring care is timely or delivered without avoidable delays.
  • Effective: Providing services based on scientific knowledge to all who could benefit and refraining from providing services to those not likely to benefit (avoiding underuse and overuse) — doing the right thing for the right person at the right time.
  • Efficient: Avoiding waste, in particular waste of equipment, supplies, ideas and energy
  • Equitable: Providing care that does not vary in quality due to personal factors such as gender, ethnicity, geographic location and socio-economic status.
  • Patient-centered (Child/Family/Client): Providing care that is respectful of and responsive to what individuals prefer, need and value. Ensuring what our patients, families and clients value guides our decisions. 

When based on the current professional knowledge, these factors increase the likelihood for the best health outcomes. Some of the most important ways we demonstrate the best and safest care are by cleaning our hands and reducing infection.

Hand Washing

It is important for health care workers to clean their hands to get rid of germs, which can spread sickness. Everyone can prevent giving germs to others, whether from contact with surfaces or with humans, by cleaning their hands.

We check and keep track of how often our team members clean their hands through observation. These are called audits.

The charts below show the results of our audits from the past six months. Our goal is for team members to be reliable with cleaning our hands at all times.

Number of care providers observed who cleaned their hands upon entering and leaving the patient room / Number of care provider observations at Children’s Wisconsin Milwaukee Hospital

Number of care providers observed washing hands

Reducing Infection

Another way we demonstrate our quality is by reducing infection. There are two types of infections common in health care settings. One is an infection at the site of a surgery on an individual, called a surgical site infection or SSI. Another is an infection in the bloodstream associated with central lines (tubes placed inside the body to support many aspects of an individual’s care), called a central line associated bloodstream infection or CLABSI.

The chart below shows the rate of surgical site infections at Children’s Wisconsin over the past six months.

Number of Surgical Site Infections from all National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (NSQIP) Cases / Total Number of NSQIP Surgery Cases at Children’s Wisconsin Milwaukee Hospital

Number of surgical site infections

The chart below shows the rate of central line associated bloodstream infections at Children’s Wisconsin over the past six months.

Number of patients with a confirmed CLABSI by Infection Prevention using CDC criteria / Total number of central line days* 1000

Number of patients with confirmed CLABSI

Quality of Care

We also work every day to improve the quality of our care. We focus on everyday improvement, emphasizing that every team member plays a role. We also work to improve over time by targeting specific quality measures.

Training, research and following guidance from organizations that oversee health care and health care professions, are some of the tools we use to improve our quality.

Model for Improvement