Shawn Jenkins Children’s Hospital at MUSC Meets Highest Care Standards to Earn ACS Verification

Five years of work by a multi-disciplinary team of pediatric care providers and academic leadership finally paid off. In January, 2022, the Shawn Jenkins Children’s Hospital at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) became the forty-first children’s surgery center in the Unites States (US) to be verified as a Level I Children’s Surgery Center by the American College of Surgery (ACS). By meeting the organization’s exacting standards for optimal pediatric care, MUSC joins only six other pediatric hospitals in the southeastern US to receive this recognition.

“This achievement directly reflects a commitment to excellence from each and every one of our care team members,” says Robert Cina, M.D., Director for Pediatric Surgical Quality at MUSC. “ACS recognition crystalizes what I witness every day from our outstanding teams who are dedicated to making world-class pediatric care accessible to every child who needs it.”

Becoming ACS verified is a voluntary, arduous process that requires establishing formal data collection and review processes to implement continuous quality-of-care and safety assessments across 135 domains of pediatric care. Corinne Corrigan, PharM.D., Children’s and Women’s Quality and Safety Manager, was in charge of ensuring each step in the process was accounted for, operationalized, and documented. “It started with a 274-question application that asked about everything from our scholarship and publications in pediatric surgery to our commitment to community outreach. We worked on that application for over a year,” says Corrigan. “At the same time, we were collecting patient safety and outcomes data and established a formal monthly meeting to go through it and look for opportunities to improve. Representatives from every area participate in the meeting, including critical care, cardiology, neonatology, and nursing, as well as ED (emergency department) and OR (operating room) staff and administrative leadership. It’s a big group – about 40 people. When we find something that we need to work on, a sub-group looks at specifically how we can change our policies and practices to make that improvement happen.”

The MUSC team launched their verification activities during construction of the Shawn Jenkins Children’s Hospital. Mark Scheurer, M.D., Chief of the Children's & Women's Integrated Center of Clinical Excellence at MUSC, was the clinical point-person for that project. “The building itself was important, but our biggest opportunity was to grow and develop the teams who would work inside it – the people who would actually serve the kids who come to us for care,” says Scheurer. “It was ambitious, but we committed to going through the ACS process because it provided us with a clear framework for developing the best clinical teams we could to work inside our new building. It helped us focus on how we were going to live out our intention to provide the highest quality-of-care possible.”

Not only does verification recognize the high level of clinical expertise and resources that a hospital provides, it also connects surgical centers in a community of excellence where they can learn from each other. “In any area of medicine, it’s easy to get siloed on your own track and just have your head down doing your work. A really special part of this process is being able to share what we do well and help everyone else do better too,” says Corrigan. “At MUSC, we created an automated tool in our EMR (electronic medical record) system to identify events that needed review. Then we shared that tool with other care centers in the network and taught them how to use it to capture and document events. I’ve been on six or eight calls with other centers to help them set it up. We help each other learn more about what we’re doing well and what we can improve on.”

The MUSC team also identified a need for specific guidelines to help ensure the fastest response possible in cases of button-battery ingestion. “When a toddler accidentally swallows a button-battery, it requires immediate surgical removal because they’re so corrosive. It can melt the esophagus and create a hole in a very short time,” says Corrigan. “These guidelines let us immediately activate the right team to respond to one of these emergency admissions, so we can intervene more quickly.”

Not only is ACS verification endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Pediatric Surgical Association, and Society of Pediatric Anesthesiology, but it also serves as a benchmark for the level of care provided. “When patients and their families walk into an ACS verified surgical center, they know that everyone from the frontline care providers all the way up to leadership are dedicated to providing the highest quality care in every aspect of what a child undergoing surgery will need – from newborns to 18-year-olds. It tells them that an outside authority has certified that we have the expertise and resources to give them the best possible care,” says Cina.

Although ACS verification is only recertified every three years, successful re-verification requires maintaining the new, multi-disciplinary processes in the day-to-day functioning of the hospital. “We now have a more structured, central review of all of our surgical cases, and that lets us learn across care teams that are not always brought together,” says Scheurer. “We cross-collaborate to achieve best practices and learn from our take aways. It has raised everyone’s expectations about continuing to improve, and that’s exciting because getting the safest most reliable surgical experience is really about the depth of the team. It’s never about just one person or one piece of technology. The best results come from having a deep team with the right resources who are devoted to caring for children every day.”

Everyone at MUSC Shawn Jenkins Children’s Hospital is eager to keep using the processes that were set up for verification to continue improving, learning, and growing. As Scheurer aptly puts it, “Getting verified and having this ACS certification is the beginning of the journey not the end.”