Tuesday 10 March 2026 | 11:00-12:00
Stream: Science
Session format: Workshop

Part 1 - Improvement founders on the rocks of understaffing: the reality of enhancing neonatal care in Kenya

This presentation demonstrates how the promise of scaling up access to technologies supported by skills training, improved data, local quality improvement and external supervision and mentorship to enhance the provision of intermediate level neonatal care in Kenyan hospitals is undermined by persistent, poor staffing. The results of multi-disciplinary research conducted over a 2 year period that made direct measurements of nurses delivery of bedside care to over 500 sick newborns, that used ethnographic methods to observe, shadow and interview staff and mothers and that collected extensive routine data will be presented. The results provide detailed information on quality and safety of neonatal care and the experiences of care from the perspective of staff and mothers. They help explain why even well-resourced programmatic interventions may have limited success and why delivering quality at scale requires a systems approach not a simple QI approach.

After this session, participants will be able to:

• See the value of novel methodologies for assessing care delivered and ‘missed care’ as a window on quality and safety
• Appreciate how multiple methods contribute to a holistic understanding of large improvement programmes including workforce enhancement efforts
• Move beyond QI thinking to systems thinking in their efforts to improve quality and safety

Mike English  University of Oxford and KEMRI-Wellcome Programme; UK

Part 2 - Using data to drive improvement in healthcare: moving from pilots to learning health systems

A Learning Health System (LHS) is an organization or network in which science, informatics, incentives and culture are aligned for continuous improvement and innovations. In this workshop we discuss the added value of using data and the development of LHS.

The LHS framework will be introduced that is useful for understanding, designing, developing and evaluating learning health system. We will discuss several ways in which learning from data contribute to improved, personalised, value-based and sustainable health care.

This more conceptual and theoretical framework will subsequently be illustrated by three different case studies of (developing) LHSs at different levels (micro, meso and macro).

During the third part of the session, the audience will be provided with thought-provoking statements to stimulate group discussions and reflect on (conditions for) the use of data and develop LHSs in their own health care contexts.

After this session, participants will be able to:

• Understand the rationale and basic building blocks of Learning Health Systems.
• Recognize (developing) LHSs in different health care contexts and at different levels in the health care system.
• Reflect on how the LHS framework could help to steer towards a more systematic and structural embedding of the use of data for continuous learning and improvement in their own organization.
• Understand what is needed to successfully develop an LHS in their own context.
  

Brent Opmeer Vilans; Netherlands
Bellis van den Berg  Vilans; Netherlands