Regional or national collaborative quality improvement initiatives in neonatology

Neonatal intensive care is a highly specialised area of healthcare that needs intensive investment of resources. It is imperative for those who work in this field to ensure the care they deliver to these infants and their families is of the highest quality. The ongoing measurement of process of care and clinical outcomes indicators is essential for monitoring quality and for addressing gaps where they occur (1). Common datasets of key indicators with standardised definitions are necessary for comparing, or benchmarking, of outcomes, which is the hallmark of clinical quality registries (2). By the nature of its very specialised work with many neonatal intensive care units facing similar clinical problems, neonatology is one of those specialties that is an early adopter of quality registries (3).