WHO Standards for Improving the Quality of Child Hospital Care

Achieving the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) goal 3 targets as elaborated in the WHO Global Strategy for Women's, Children's, and Adolescent's Health (2016-2030) will require ensuring universal access to safe, effective, quality and affordable care for women, children and adolescents. Despite the progress made in the last two decades, an estimated 6.6 million infants, children and young adults still died in 2016 (5.6 million children under five and 1 million children aged 5-14) mostly from preventable causes. To provide universal health coverage with quality, every woman, child and adolescent should receive quality care throughout their life course and during care. This requires institutionalization of safe, effective, quality service delivery.

Studies have shown that most often children do not receive basic elements of care or are often inappropriately managed, and their rights as patients are not respected. Therefore, urgent actions are required to ensure that the care given to all children in health facilities is evidence-based, safe, effective, timely, efficient, equitable and appropriate for their age and stage of development, and that care provided is child and family centred, and that all rights of children are respected. WHO recently launched (May 2018) the "Standards for improving quality of care for children and young adolescents in health facilities", to address the quality of care for children 0-15 years of age in health facilities. These pediatric Standards complement previous standards addressing quality of maternal and newborn care.

The WHO standards are based on a WHO paediatric quality of care framework, which highlights 8 specific domains of care that are critical to providing quality care for children (Fig. 1). These domains are organized into three main categories: provision of care (including: 1. Evidenced based practices; 2. Actionable information system; 3. Functioning referral system), experience of care (including: 4. Effective communication; 5. Respect, protection and fulfilment of child rights; 6. Emotional and psychological support) and availability of child- and adolescent-friendly resources (including 7. Competent, motivated, empathetic human resources and 8. Essential child and adolescent-friendly physical resources). The framework takes into account children's right to health and recognizes that their needs are different from those of adults.

Currently there is very limited field experience in the use of the WHO Standards for improving Quality of Care. More in general, routine use of data to improve case management and organization of care is still not a common practice, even in countries with well-established data collection systems. Despite there are some good examples of how routine data collection systems are used to shape health policies and strategies in the pediatric field in low and middle-income countries, these are quite limited in number, with most of the experience being conducted in a research/project setting.

he aim of this study is to test the use of the WHO Pediatric standards for improving the quality of child hospital care, as summarized by a score of total mean quality score for patients (range 0-100 points).