How to improve quality in your ICU – Dr Jorge Salluh

The AVF Podcast: ICU Tips & Tricks invites colleagues to share anything and everything on how they deal with various clinical situations. Expect discussions on how experts personalise evidence-based medicine for the patient at the bedside.

In this episode, Dr Jorge Salluh discusses how one can drive quality improvement in the intensive care unit (ICU), both at the local level and in international registries. Dr Salluh is a Brazilian critical care physician working in Rio de Janeiro and a researcher at the not-for-profit D'or Institute for Research and Education. He has been working with outcomes and quality improvement projects for the last 17 years. He is a founder of the Brazilian Research in Intensive Care Network (BRICnet), the Brazilian ICUs registry, and the Linking of Global Intensive Care (LOGIC) consortium.

Issues discussed in this interview:
• What quality improvement is
• Skillsets needed for quality improvement
• How to choose data for collection
• How to choose quality indicators
• How to establish targets
• Frameworks for quality improvement such as the PDCA cycle
• Role of ICU registries
• Linking of Global Intensive Care (LOGIC) consortium
Work cited:
1. da Silva Ramos FJ, de Freitas FGR, de Souza Pacheco E, Salluh JIF, Machado F. Top five priorities for a new ICU director during the first year. ICU Management & Practice 2021;21:113-116.
2. Rhodes A, Moreno RP, Azoulay E, et al. Prospectively defined indicators to improve the safety and quality of care for critically ill patients: a report from the Task Force on Safety and Quality of the European Society of Intensive Care Medicine (ESICM). Intensive Care Med. 2012;38:598-605.
3. Zampieri FG, Salluh JIF, Azevedo LCP, et al. ICU staffing feature phenotypes and their relationship with patients' outcomes: an unsupervised machine learning analysis. Intensive Care Med 2019;45:1599-1607.
4. Dongelmans DA, Pilcher D, Beane A, et al. Linking of global intensive care (LOGIC): An international benchmarking in critical care initiative. J Crit Care 2020;60:305-310.
5. LOGIC: Linking of Global Intensive Care. https://www.icubenchmarking.com/logic....