P3.114: What International Community Access to Child Health (ICATCH) learned from a collaborative pilot educating grantees on Quality Improvement Techniques - revelations and opportunities to improve.”

Purpose/Objectives: The AAP’s International Community Access to Child Health (ICATCH) program supports community-based projects in low/low-middle income countries to improve child health through access to health services, nutrition and education. Ideas for three-year ICATCH projects must originate from and being carried out by local child health providers.

Quality Improvement (QI) techniques could be a valuable resource for ICATCH community health projects facing barriers to achieve goals, improve data collection and outcome evaluation without funding for additional staff or project director protected time.

Annual reports (2007-2020) indicated that grantees were not feeling connected to technical assistance or similar ICATCH projects elsewhere.

We sought to provide a learning collaborative to support information sharing among sites and facilitation of child health improvements by utilizing Quality Improvement (QI) techniques during 2020-2023 grant cycle.

Design/Methods: ICATCH QI working group (QI WG) piloted quarterly webinars with ICATCH 2020-2023 cohort. QI WG includes reviewers with experience teaching and utilizing QI methods and ICATCH liaisons for all seven projects.

Over 34 months, ICATCH hosted multiple 90-minute webinars focusing on

AIM statement

PDSA cycle

Monitoring and evaluating data

Team development

Tools for project sustainability, collaborations and partnerships



Each webinar was preceded by virtual QI WG planning sessions. Post webinar grantee evaluations were conducted after Year (Y)1 and Y3 via Survey Monkey.

Results: An initial query re knowledge/actual experience with QI methodology revealed that 14 grantee participants’ experience varied from no introductory knowledge to a co-director who taught and utilized QI previously. Year 1's four webinars included all seven project directors, QI WG and liaisons.

In Y1, Webinars began with 5–10-minute updates from each project, leaving insufficient time for breakouts to trouble shoot challenges.

Webinars in Y2 and Y3 included grantees from six remaining projects (Myanmar suspended due to unforeseen circumstances) focused on newborn health, disability and mental health.

In Y2 we formed communities of practice and aggregated projects with similar interests for better exchange of ideas, dividing participating projects into two groups, repeating QI topics. This resulted in more discussion time among project directors and higher quality breakout sessions.

In addition, the ICATCH Annual/Final Reports WG reported that required forms from 2020-23 QI cohort contained much improved content--both quality and amount of data evaluated for output and outcomes.

QI WG was better informed about these six QI projects—successes, challenges and partnership collaborations--allowing ICATCH to offer technical assistance earlier to trouble shoot challenges.

Conclusion/Discussion: Although ICATCH’s QI WG struggled with time commitment to plan/execute twelve QI focused webinars in Y2-3, we recognize the value for both grantees and their projects and for the QI WG and liaisons. Our greatest challenge will be how to offer this technical support to all active and future ICATCH grants.