Quality and Patient Safety at the Center for Children’s Surgery

We monitor and report surgical outcomes to help us continuously improve our care for children undergoing surgery and inform families. Doing so has helped us become one of the best centers for pediatric surgery in the country. Sharing these outcomes with the public helps educate families, and the families that physicians refer to us, and ensures them that they can expect the highest level of surgical care when they come to Children’s Hospital Colorado.

Pediatric surgical outcomes

We measure patient safety and our quality of care in many ways. We consider a surgery successful based on several factors, such as the type of surgery, other medical issues a patient may have and the level of illness prior to the surgery.

Each surgery has different levels of success, expectations and outcomes. Some surgeries are considered “palliative,” meaning that the surgery can help improve a medical issue and quality of a patient’s life but cannot cure a patient’s medical problems.

By standardizing our methods to measure each surgery, we can continuously improve our surgical techniques and outcomes. We do this by reviewing our work every day and collaborating with organizations like the American College of Surgeons (ACS), which collects data and helps set national surgical standards of care and quality benchmarks.

Why surgery outcomes are important

The way we measure success for treatment of a torn ligament will be very different from how we measure success for a liver transplant. So we analyze each surgery individually and provide transparency on our success rates for referring physicians and patients and their families.

Sharing these outcomes here helps reassure our patients that they are getting the best care. We provide as much data as we can to demonstrate our expertise and give our patients and their families ways to compare our hospital to those across the nation.

A Level 1 Children’s Surgery Center

We’ve been contributing to the National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (NSQIP) since its inception in 2008 and have been awarded a Level 1 Children’s Surgery verification from the ACS’s Surgical Quality and Safety Program. Children’s Colorado is the only Level 1 pediatric center in Colorado one of about 50 in the US. This verification from the ACS’s Children’s Surgery Verification Program recognizes the outstanding quality and safety programs we have at our center.

Being awarded a Level 1 Children’s Surgery Center verification means that we have met the program’s highest and most comprehensive requirements. This verification, along with the many years we’ve been contributing to the program at the ACS, shows our commitment to delivering high quality service and upholding our dedication to transparency with our referring providers and patients.

This award is a testament to our entire surgical team and support staff. It also showcases how we’ve used what we’ve learned from our outcomes data to continually improve our care.

Advancing surgical outcomes

As part of an organization-wide initiative, we have broadened and deepened our strategy to measure outcomes across all surgical specialties in our hospital. This includes developing an easy way for surgical teams to review patient outcomes quickly and efficiently. This data helps us develop ways to improve our whole care system, including how we deliver care before, during and after surgery.

In addition to improving care, this data also helps us understand what new technology can help us work better and safer, including things like expanding our minimally invasive surgery program.

Surgery specializations and outcomes

Find outcomes for many of our surgical specialties:

• Colorectal Surgery
• Heart Surgery
• Maternal Fetal Care and Fetal Surgery
• Orthopedic Surgery
• Transplant Surgery (Liver and Kidney)
• Urology

Second opinions for all types of surgery

When it comes to surgery, you want the absolute best for you child. That is why we offer second opinions. Even if you have already been to another hospital, you can schedule a second opinion with us to be sure that the surgery your child is receiving is necessary, that it is the right surgery for their condition and that you are working with a qualified, experienced pediatric surgeon.