Healthcare providers, including physicians and other allied health professionals working within the Emergency Department (ED) microsystem, strive to provide the best care possible. Unfortunately, substantial variation exists for the quality of care delivered to children. Quality improvement training is rarely provided to pediatric emergency care providers and national forums for general quality improvement training rarely address the unique problems encountered in the often chaotic world of ED care. Enhanced leadership in quality will allow for health care organization improvement by providing a more robust system for finding best practices, more investment and persistence in improving workforce knowledge and skills, more consistent development of effective teams and teamwork and more sophisticated, extensive and informative measurement of performance and outcomes. This project is a national conference for enhancing leadership in quality improvement and partners the resources of investigators at Baylor College of Medicine, representatives from institutions across the United States, and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) with partial funding from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). The overall objective of this proposal is to host a conference that will maximize knowledge and skills of the Pediatric Emergency Medicine (PEM) workforce in order to deliver the highest quality emergency care to children. Quality improvement / improvement science themes will specifically address research, best-practices, and current knowledge in the domains of quality and safety, translating research into practice and policy (TRIPP), and PEM workforce development and administration. The conference will be held in San Antonio, Texas on April 14-19, 2010. Following the assembly of an AAP Pediatric Emergency Medicine Leadership Planning Committee, a proposal for this conference to be hosted by the AAP was accepted by their continuing medical education office. The needs assessment and preliminary planning was conducted by the committee in January of 2008. Additional funding is sought to improve the scope of speakers and moderators to address the critical topics defined by the committee within the three conference domains described above. Plenary sessions and workshops have been developed and described by the planning committee. As part of this conference, abstracts and storyboards will be encouraged (in competition) for workshops moderated by national quality experts and emerging PEM quality experts in the following categories: pain/sedation, throughput, respiratory illnesses, medication errors, safety/safety culture, and improvement through health information technology. Innovative evaluation measures by the investigators will track intention to change, knowledge, attitude and skills as well as standard assessments of conference implementation by AAP staff. In addition to drawing from the knowledge gained from the presentations within the moderated sessions, moderator pairs will develop manuscripts integrating that information with global quality improvement initiatives and address existing research questions applicable to pediatric emergency medicine for each of the seven topics. Website postings of lessons learned and publications of the above manuscripts will serve as the products of dissemination. The overall goal of this project is to improve the quality of care for children requiring emergent care by training and motivating those individuals who are in a position to affect change while producing and disseminating the products of this conference nationally. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Narrative: relevance of a PEM Quality Leadership Conference to public health This project is a conference designed after extensive needs assessment to train pediatric emergency medicine practitioners and administrators in quality improvement strategies through workshops and plenary sessions to translate knowledge into policy and practice, to improve the workforce emergency providers that deal with children, and to enhance quality and safety in the course of care delivery in light of the crises facing the public health sector for disparate and variable care delivered to children in emergency settings. Although the institutions that participants will represent will be vastly different in design, they have in common, emergent care delivery to all of the nation's children who present for emergency care: this represents populations of acute and chronic disease, of diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, of variable disease etiologies, of broad geographic representations, of both genders and all ethnicities/race. This project will provide participants with knowledge and strategies that learners of all levels of engagement in quality improvement, including novices, can operationalize within their own diverse infrastructures to improve the quality of care for all children.