Margherita-PROSAFE:Promoting Patient Safety and Quality Improvement in Critical Care

Intensive care is one of the largest, most expensive, most complex components of European healthcare; each year about one million patients are admitted to intensive care units across Europe. The project contributes to European society in the long-term by promoting cooperation between member states in the critical care domain, with a view to improving the safety of patients admitted to ICUs and to continuously assessing performance through international comparison of outcomes and procedures. It also contributes to the exchange of good practice, reduce medical errors and promote high quality services in public health. Patient safety and quality of care measurement and improvement are among the most important, challenging aspects of public health. The intensive and critical care domains need continuous monitoring and improvement considering the high mortality rates in and major financial investments required by ICUs. However, collection of ICU performance data is not standardized and no transnational EU project to improve patient safety and to assess performance and quality of care is currently operating for ICUs. The project provides long-term benefits to European society by promoting cooperation between member states in the critical care domain with a view to improving the safety of patients admitted to ICUs and performing continuous performance evaluation through comparison of outcomes and procedures at international level. The aim of this project is to export the positive results achieved through an Italian experience (Margherita system) to other European countries, addressing in particular new member states where benchmarking is sparse and uncoordinated and quality assessment and comparison is needed. Methods and means: It is proposed to build an ICU network across EU to collect standardized data on admitted patients, to perform statistical analyses based on national and intercountry comparisons and to appropriately identify and manage strengths and weaknesses in performance.