The Family Place, Evangelical Community Hospital’s obstetrics unit, has further advanced its staff education for safe practices at the Hospital, offering newborns and their mothers the best possible care.

PA Safe Sleep

The Family Place staff members completed the three necessary phases of the PA Sleep Program to be one of the more than 30 hospitals in Pennsylvania who educate mothers on safe infant sleep practices.

The PA Safe Sleep program was created specifically to combat sleep-related deaths of infants in Pennsylvania.

Based on guidance from the American Academy of Pediatrics, the program is evidence-based and works with staff on quality improvement, Safe Sleep Nursing policies, training as Subject Matter Experts, data collection interactive staff education, and patient education materials.

The Family Place clinical nurses have all received the necessary training to become subject matter experts, assisting patients with the ABC’s of safe sleep—babies should always be placed to sleep ALONE, on their BACK, and in their own CRIB.

Maternal Health Quality Improvement Award

The Family Place also received the Quality Improvement Award from the Pennsylvania Perinatal Quality Collaborative (PA PQC), which is funded by the Pennsylvania Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs and administered by the Jewish Healthcare Foundation. To earn the award, The Family Place successfully completed five milestones demonstrating how The Family Place is implementing best practices and using data to improve care for pregnant and postpartum women with substance use.

The Family Place has been an active participant with the PA PQC since its inception in 2019. In 2021, The Family Place received its first Quality Improvement Award and has continued to meet the necessary milestones to earn additional awards in the following quarters. The most recent awards were earned by meeting milestones for the period of July 1, 2023 through October 31, 2023. Evangelical is one of 63 birth hospitals/NICUs across the Commonwealth striving to complete these milestones and earn this PA PQC recognition.

The milestones included completing a PA PQC learning session, submission of Quality Improvement Report Out showing work related to implementing key interviews, completing a quarterly survey , submitting necessary aggregated data on process and outcome measures, and communicating the team’s impact for patient internally and to the community.

As a result, The Family Place has been awarded $10,000 to further support efforts to build the care team’s infrastructure for improving the identification of and care for pregnant and postpartum individuals with substance use and neonatal abstinence syndrome.

For more information on The Family Place, visit www.EvanHospital.com/TheFamilyPlace.