There will be plenty to talk about when the Florida Perinatal Quality Collaborative convenes its fourth annual conference at the Holiday Inn West Shore Hotel in Tampa on April 23-24.  Three national speakers will address this year’s conference, and the focus, as in previous editions, will be quality.  After all, that’s what the FPQC is all about.

“What is particularly good about this conference is it’s not a doctor-oriented conference, and it isn’t a nurse-oriented conference,” said Dr. John Curran, FPQC co-founder and co-director.

“It’s about perinatal health as it relates to consumers, insurance company representatives, nurses, nurse midwives, neonatal nurses, nurse practitioners, obstetricians and neonatologists, as well as some of our trainees in the programs we have in public health and in medicine – particularly, advanced training in neonatology.

 

“It’s got energy and enthusiasm,” he said of the conference.  “People really focus on the patient, not on their personal advancement or their research grants.”

Curran, who is joint faculty in COPH’s Department of Community and Family Health and the Department of Pediatrics at the Morsani College of Medicine, leads FPQC with Dr. William Sappenfield, CFH professor/chair and director of the Lawton and Rhea Chiles Center for Healthy Mothers and Babies.

“One of the things that we’re going to be talking about are new hospital quality indicators that we’re developing for Florida hospitals,” Sappenfield said, “so that we eventually will have ways to try to measure the quality of perinatal care in 116 delivering hospitals in Florida.

“We have a pilot project funded by the March of Dimes and by the Florida Department of Health.  We’ll be going to Tallahassee to lay out a final proposal and then start recruiting hospitals to participate.”

Emily Bronson, who earned an MPH in anthropology and maternal and child health at the USF College of Public Health, got involved with FPQC as a graduate assistant in the  Community and Family Health, and literally graduated into her full-time position as a quality improvement analyst who helps coordinate projects for the organization.

“The Florida Perinatal Quality Collaborative focuses on statewide quality improvement in maternal and neonatal health care, and so the conference is an effort to bring all the key stakeholders from across the state together,” Bronson said.  “This is our fourth annual conference, so we’re very excited.”

Bronson said the conference usually draws more than 200 attendees, and each year has seen a larger attendance than the year before.

“We hope for 300 this year,” she said.

A stakeholders’ initiative begun in 2009 and driven by the Florida Department of Health and the March of Dimes established the FPQC in 2010, Bronson said, and the Chiles Center was the immediate natural choice for its headquarters.

“The original funding came from a March of Dimes seed grant and focused on one project, but since then, we’ve grown into a number of projects,” she said.

The second day of the 2015 conference will feature breakout sessions on specifically focused topics within the maternal and child health profession.  There also will be a poster session illustrating quality improvement projects from various hospitals and agencies.

Student involvement will be part of the picture.

“We encourage especially the medical and nursing students to submit posters and to attend,” Bronson said.

In particular, she said, students from pediatrics and obstetrics/gynecology are sought.

“And of course,” she added, “public health students to help us take notes and just help put the event on.  We’ve had great volunteers in the past.”

“What impresses me this year,” Curran said, “is we’re having a mother-oriented project and a baby-oriented project.”

The mother-oriented project, he said, will involve pulling together theories and implications from a decade of studying why women die related to pregnancy.

“These are young women,” he said, “and young women should not die in childbirth or from complications related to childbirth.”

Curran said one-forth of the 367 childbirth-related deaths in Florida during that 10-year period were attributed to hemorrhaging.  He spoke of a life saved in central Florida, where the mother had needed 155 units of whole blood, by far the most he has ever seen used on one patient, and had “coded and tried to die either two or three times.”  Ten days later, he said, “she went home intact.”

The difference, he said, was better identification of the problem and knowing the protocol to follow when it occurred.  The hospital was caught up on the risk and what to do if profuse hemorrhaging occurred, and it had made certain that every member of its staff knew what to do.

“There’s a life saved,” Curran said.  “It can happen in a small hospital, it can happen in a big hospital, and it doesn’t depend on the frequency of deliveries.  Know there’s trouble, have a protocol, all the pieces coming together, support – it’s manageable, and we’re going to make a difference in this state,” he said, punctuating his determination with fingertip taps on his desk.

Another part of the conference, he said, will focus on California’s hypertension toolkit – in particular, how to adapt, develop and deploy it in Florida with the partners that FPQC has made within the state.

The high rate of caesarian deliveries in south Florida, in some hospitals three times what it should be for first-time mothers with uncomplicated pregnancies, also will be addressed in-depth.

“We’re making real progress,” Curran said, “We have energy and passion, as you’ve noticed.  I’m  a believer.”

“The FPQC conference is another manifestation of how an epidemiologist can have a role related to perinatal quality and improvement in the use of data,” Sappenfield said. “We’re continuing to find ways to use data to guide policy and programs to make a measurable difference.”

 

Story by David Brothers, College of Public Health.