Improving the quality of paediatric care

This operational guide provides guidance for establishing and conducting paediatric death audit and review as part of the overall quality of care improvement at the health facility. Death review or mortality audit is a means of documenting the causes of a death and the factors that contributed to it, identifying factors that could be modified and actions that could prevent future deaths, putting the actions into place and reviewing the outcomes. The objective of audit and review is to determine whether patient care is consistent with evidence based best practices, and to provide feedback to health workers to improve health care practices. It helps in identifying patterns of morbidity, mortality, modifiable factors and interventions to improve the quality of care and outcomes in health care facilities. 

This document complements the audit and review of stillbirths and neonatal deaths guide by providing guidance on review and auditing of paediatric deaths; adverse events, near-misses and other paediatric clinical cases of interest.