Quest is ringing in the New Year with an important new project, Healthy Babies, Healthy Moms, which promises to be truly exciting. Jenny Brandenburg, Director of Women and Children's Services at Decatur Memorial Hospital, has agreed to serve as Clinical Lead for the project. Decatur Memorial Hospital is one of just six hospitals in Illinois that are piloting the March of Dimes program eliminating elective pre-term inductions and c-sections. Pre-term is defined as a delivery prior to 39 weeks. Babies grow and develop at an incredible rate throughout pregnancy. To have the best chance of a safe and healthy birth, babies that can go to term, should go to term.

Unfortunately, elective pre-term inductions and c-sections have become all too common. Labor induction rates have doubled nationally since 1990. Now, more than one in five babies are electively delivered before it is truly safe. Pre-term induction is medically indicated in some situations, in which case, the induction is not considered elective.

The Healthy Babies, Healthy Moms team's goal is to help our region standardize to best practice and eliminate elective pre-term deliveries. The team's tasks are to:

– Identify evidence-based guidelines

– Adopt processes needed to eliminate unsafe, pre-term inductions

– Select key quality and safety measures and determine a means of collecting data to report to Quality Quest.

– Recommend approaches to heighten the awareness of clinicians, patients and families about the importance of full term births

Quest is experiencing unprecedented interest in this project. Happily, much work has been done in Illinois and nationally by others like the March of Dimes. Quality Quest will be tapping into those efforts and learning from them. We will be building on the good work of others.