TY - JOUR T1 - Highlights from this issue JF - Archives of Disease in Childhood - Fetal and Neonatal Edition JO - Arch Dis Child Fetal Neonatal Ed SP - F1 LP - F1 DO - 10.1136/archdischild-2018-316625 VL - 104 IS - 1 AU - Ben J Stenson Y1 - 2019/01/01 UR - http://fn.bmj.com/content/104/1/F1.abstract N2 - The editor’s choice this month would make a great choice for your journal club. When you have read it and the accompanying editorial by Lamia Soghier and Billie Lou Short you will want plenty of your colleagues to read the two articles too and start talking about them. Joseph Kaempf and colleagues try to get to the bottom of what might explain some of the variations in outcomes observed between neonatal units. This takes us a step further from potentially better practices to potentially better characteristics – the features that might make some units more successful than others at implementing otherwise similar quality initiatives. There is a lot of work in this. They measured the outcomes of a large group of neonatal units over a 14 year period using a composite morbidity measure. All the units were successful at reducing their composite morbidities over the study period but some consistently outperformed the others throughout. They also conducted an environmental survey at each NICU that explored 103 unit characteristics This included 39 items related to quality improvement methodology and medical therapies, 22 related to staffing, eight related to the physical environment, 30 cultural, social and cognitive … ER -