History & Vision

In 2016, the eleven NICUs in Oregon and Southwest Washington began working together as part of a Quality Improvement initiative focused on antibiotic stewardship jointly sponsored by the Vermont Oxford Network (VON) and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). An informal infrastructure, NWIPA was created, with identified leaders from each NICU and a subgroup of those leaders responsible for developing a charter that included a statewide goal, measurements, timeline and meetings during the year. NWIPA also involved the Oregon Health Authority (OHA) and the March of Dimes (MOD) in this work and was able to obtain funding support from them as well as several of the partner organizations (such as Northwest Newborn Specialists, Oregon Health & Science University [OHSU], and Salem Health).

NWIPA has broadened its scope of work and collaboration beyond antibiotic stewardship as described in its purpose. Partnership between NICU professionals and families is of primary importance in accomplishing its purpose. To achieve this goal, NWIPA was housed under the rubric of the Oregon Pediatric Improvement Partners (OPIP) and works closely withthe Oregon Perinatal Collaborative (OPC) and other key stakeholder agencies. In 2020, Hillsboro Medical Center added a level II NICU and joined the NWIPA as the 12th unit.

Current Efforts

NWIPA, OPIP and OPC are partnering on a CDC funded project to better understand the needs of families and patients in the eleven NICUs in Oregon and SW Washington.

Through qualitative assessment, the goals of this project are:

• In collaboration with OPC, development of a neonatal quality improvement project for well newborns
• Capacity management and disaster planning throughout the region
• Management and care of the smallest infants
• Insurance barriers to back transport of infants to NICUs closer to their communities

Past Efforts

• Antibiotic stewardship
• Family-Integrated Care and Family-Integrated Quality Improvement (FI-C-QI) assessment, a partnership project between NWIPA, OPIC, and OPC on a CDC-funded project to identify patient-centered improvement opportunities.
• Collaboration with OPC on perinatal and neonatal care during COVID-19 pandemic
• Management of neonates during the RSV surge in 2022