OUR APPROACH
Una Vita’s approach to Creating a Safer Birthplace for Women is differentiated by deeper and more actionable insights into the complexities of building a sustainable culture of perinatal safety. Our mutual challenge is to transform perinatal patient safety at your facility.
We will conduct a detailed assessment of the delivery of perinatal care.
Una Vita’s Perinatal Gap Analysis (PGA) deploys the industry’s leading experts in Maternal Fetal Medicine, Obstetrics, Nursing, and Organizational Leadership to ensure your facility meets professional best practices and external standards.
The Perinatal Gap Analysis enables a robust drill-down supporting a level of granular detail that identifies opportunities for your organization to integrate key processes and meet national metrics.
Una Vita provides a thorough assessment that identifies opportunities and makes recommendations to enhance your Perinatal Safety Culture.
Components of our assessment work may include:
1. Outcomes, Process & Structure Measures
- Maternal Care Performance Metrics
- Severe Mortality Morbidity Measures (SMM)
- Obstetrical Co-Morbidity Review
- Urgent Maternal Warning Signs
- Compare Your Hospital Discharge Data with National Best Practices
2. Teamwork & Communication
- Leadership Structure
- Open Communication
- Clinical Coverage
- SBAR Reports, Huddles, Daily Ongoing Exchange of Information
- Avoidance of Disruptive Behavior
- Interdisciplinary Rounds
- Nursing and Medical Chain of Command
- Emergency Department Interface
- Documentation System Templates
- Obstetrical and Neonatal Quality Review
- Language Line and Interpreters
- Peer Review
- Debriefing Process
3. Policies, Procedures & Deployment
- Triage Process and Assessments
- Management of Shoulder Dystocia
- Perinatal Codes, Criteria and Responses
- Neonatal Resuscitation: NRP-Golden Hour
- Use of Oxytocin and Prostaglandin
- Operative Vaginal Delivery, Cesarean Delivery, VBAC
- Hemorrhage Policy and Toolkit
- Management of Preeclampsia and Toolkit
- Early Detection and Treatment of Sepsis
- Elective Deliveries
4. Physical Environment & Equipment
- Logistics of Space, Equipment, Supplies, Drugs, and Maternal and Neonatal Emergency Resuscitation Equipment
- Equipment for Safe Movement of Large BMI Patients
5. Education, Preparation & Readiness
- Obstetrical and Neonatal Safety Drills
- Orientations – Structure and Content
- Clinical Competencies
- Interpretation and Documentation of Electronic Fetal Monitor Tracings
- Role of Perinatal or Neonatal Educators or Clinical Nurse Specialist
- Neonatal Resuscitation Program
- TeamSTEPPS
6. Diversity, Equity, Inclusion
- Systems to Document Self-identified Race, Ethnicity, and Primary Language
- Staff Education and Training on How to Ask Demographic Intake Questions
- Patients Understanding of why Ethnicity, and Language Data are Being Collected
- Peripartum Racial and Ethnic Disparities and Their Root Causes
- Best Practices for Shared Decision Making
- Community Partnerships on Quality and Safety
- Health Equity Index
- HEI Certification
VALUE
When a health system/hospital invests in a sustainable culture of perinatal safety they are listening to the needs of the community, supporting healthcare providers, and championing public health to ensure fewer complications and healthier outcomes for women and their babies.
As we know, the U.S. is the only developed country with rising mortality and severe morbidity rates in its maternity care system. The World Health Organization estimates that pregnancy complications cost the U.S. healthcare system an estimated $80 billion annually. The liability environment for maternity care is volatile, and hospitals are paying record awards in lawsuits involving preventable maternal mortality and severe maternal morbidity. Investment in perinatal safety planning is a decisive protective measure.
With the CDC suggesting that 60% of all maternal deaths in the U.S. are fully preventable, we are confident that we can identify factors associated with severe maternal morbidity and plan for interventions to prevent adverse events. The transformational stretch-goal aim is: Zero Harm.
Hospitals and healthcare systems who invest in the creation and support of a perinatal culture of safety with the Una Vita Perinatal Gap Analysis™ will be rewarded with better birth outcomes, reduced lengths of stay, increased patient satisfaction, reduced litigation, and improved net promoter scores.
With Una Vita’s national experts, decades of experience, and its comprehensive interviews, analysis, benchmarking, and recommendation process, your maternity care will be profoundly improved.
CULTURE OF SAFETY
At the core of the Una Vita Perinatal Gap Analysis™ is our commitment to organizational transformation.
Una Vita works with leadership, physicians, and staff to create a sustainable Perinatal High Reliability Organization.
We are not looking to accomplish minor and sporadic improvements. Instead, we partner with senior leadership to generate profound improvement and transformed culture.
Una Vita believes in creating a Culture of Safety in a way that engenders and instills a Just Culture which is the primary and overarching goal of our work together.
Safety culture is a performance-shaping factor that guides the many discretionary behaviors of healthcare professionals toward viewing maternal safety as one of their highest priorities.
Healthcare, in general, will make significant progress when it comes to see itself as a high-hazard industry with inherent risks. We must abandon the philosophy of requiring perfect, error-free performance from individuals that often causes fear and mistakes to be swept under the rug, and focus instead on designing systems for safety.
BIRTH EQUITY
Una Vita is deeply aware of disparities in perinatal outcomes in the United States.
We work with hospitals and healthcare systems to identify birth equity gaps and to implement changes that help to keep all women safe in a just maternal healthcare culture.
Data show that African American women and American Indian/Alaskan Native women are three-to-four times more likely to experience a pregnancy-related death than white women. Statistics show that these groups also experience far more serious maternal health complications. Significant disparities occur within other non-white ethnic populations as well.
The bottom line is that too many women are suffering preventable severe maternal morbidity and death. Una Vita provides the methodology and means to close gaps in care for all at-risk women. Working together we identify and implement standardized protocols in quality improvement and we identify and address implicit bias in healthcare to improve patient-provider communication and interaction.
Our goal is to work with your maternity care services to implement interventions that prevent all at-risk women from moving along the continuum of severity.
National Experts
Through the Una Vita Perinatal Gap Analysis™ we will provide you with the best national experts for the improvement of maternity services at your facility. Una Vita matches your needs for optimized perinatal performance with experienced leaders, physicians, and national authorities.
Our talented and experienced team will complete a detailed gap evaluation through data analyses and extensive interviews with your leadership, physicians, nursing departments, as well as with quality and risk management.
Your information and data are evaluated against national standards, statistics, and standard measures for excellence in perinatal culture, and birth equity.
Una Vita’s advisory service offers your organization a seasoned team of healthcare experts and physicians who provide you with decades of combined experience in developing nationally recognized women’s and neonatal programs for hospitals and health systems.