Course Goals
The goal of this EQIPP Growth Surveillance and Linear Growth Failure course is to help you create plans for improvement and to address gaps identified in key activities of clinical care related to growth surveillance and the identification of children with linear growth failure. These activities focus on improving ongoing medical care and patient self-management education and support. You will collect baseline and follow-up data as you work to improve care and processes through Plan, Do, Study, and Act (PDSA) cycles.
Learning Objectives
By the end of this course, you will:
- Be familiar with the following guidelines and recommendations:
- AAP Bright Futures Recommendations for Preventive Pediatric Health Care. Bright Futures / American Academy of Pediatrics.
- Performing Preventive Service: Physical Examination. (Sexual Maturity Stages pp. 79-85) Hagan JF, Shaw JS, Duncan P, Bright Futures: Guidelines for Health Supervision of Infants, Children, and Adolescents.
- The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, Consensus Statement on the Diagnosis and Treatment of Children with Idiopathic Short Stature: A Summary of the Growth Hormone Research Society, vol. 93 no. 11, November 1, 2008, 4210-4217. http://jcem.endojournals.org/
- Recognize how the key activities identified in this course contribute to high-quality, ongoing growth surveillance of all patients and care of patients identified with linear growth failure.
- Be able to implement ideas for change to help you do the following:
- For the pediatrician, demonstrate regular and accurate measurement and plotting of growth at every health supervision visit, and ideally during all visits to provide a complete record of growth.
- For the endocrinologist, demonstrate regular and accurate measurement and plotting of growth at every visit to monitor growth care.
- Assess pubertal development at every health supervision visit.
- Share the child’s growth pattern with the family at every health supervision visit.
- Identify and address patient/family’s growth or development concerns.
- Provide necessary education and support when a growth or pubertal development concern is raised or a psychosocial issue is identified.
- Create (endocrinologist) or obtain (pediatrician) a written care plan for patients with abnormal growth that is developed in partnership with the patient and family, shared with growth team members, and includes timely health status updates.
- Establish processes for regular, ongoing communication among growth care team members that identifies team members, facilitates effective referrals, and provides timely updates on the patient’s care plan and health status.
- Measure and improve care delivery and processes for the above key activities by doing the following:
- Collect and analyze baseline data to establish a starting point for improvement.
- Identify one or more performance gaps in one or more key activities of growth surveillance/care.
- Create an improvement plan for closing identified performance gap(s) by clarifying the improvement idea to be tested:
- AIM: What are we trying to improve or accomplish?
- MEASURES: How will we know that a change made is an improvement?
- CHANGES: What changes can we make that will result in improvement?
- Test your ideas quickly, on a small scale, so you can determine if the changes lead to improvement.
- Collect and analyze follow-up data to measure the results of your test. (A minimum of two follow-up data collection cycles are necessary for course completion and maintenance of certification recognition).
- Determine how to sustain successful changes and how to systematically integrate them into the culture, processes, and workflow of your practice.
- Create additional improvement plans and repeat PDSA cycles until you reach the maximum potential of providing optimal growth surveillance/care in your practice.