CATS have an internationally recognised reputation for quality and safety. We are also compliant with the UK Paediatric Intensive Care Society (PICS) standards and contribute outcome data to the national Paediatric Intensive Care Audit Network (PICANet) for benchmarking purposes.

Our clinical governance structure is integrated within the structure at Great Ormond Street Hospital and we regularly monitor key performance indicators and clinical outcomes. We also have a strong shared governance arrangement with our referring hospitals to ensure that patient safety remains at the centre of everything we do.

Our Quality Standards

We use several key performance indicators to continuously audit the quality of the service we provide such as:

  • Team mobilisation time
  • Team stabilisation time at the local hospital
  • Refusals due to unavailability of team or suitable PICU bed
  • Number of children waiting more than 8 hrs for a retrieval team at referring hospitals
  • Number of children transferred to out-of-region PICUs

Our Safety Standards

We have several meetings where safety issues are examined and audited on a regular basis:

  • Daily weekday morning review of all referrals and retrievals
  • Monthly Mortality / Morbidity meetings at CATS
  • Joint PICU / CATS Mortality / Morbidity meetings
  • Quarterly Risk Action Group meetings, with representation from PICU as well as referring hospitals

We audit Patient Safety Indicators included in the PICANet transport dataset as well as equipment-related, ambulance-related and communication-related incidents to provide a continuous assessment of our safety profile.

Our Clinical Outcomes

In addition to retrieval outcomes, CATS collect patient outcome data such as mortality, critical incidents and interventions in the first 24 hours of reaching a PICU. We use PIM-3 score (a severity of illness score for PICU patients) as a means of case mix adjustment.