[Assessment and outcome of perinatal and neonatal care in North Rhine area].

The objective of the quality assurance program "Perinatalerhebung" and "Neonatalerhebung" is to ameliorate the perinatal and neonatal care in German hospitals. Standardised data defined by a team of experts in the early seventies are documented for more than 20 years in the North Rhine area. The documentation of more than 1.6 million deliveries created a data pool that served as a thesaurus for the improvement of medical care in obstetrical units. The same has been achieved for neonatal care on the documentation basis of more than 168,000 newborn infants admitted to a neonatal department. The results show that the approach to evaluate continuously the data monitored enables improvement in care. The support given is the anonymous collection of the documentation sheets/data sets and their evaluation by an expert committee. The results show that obstetrical management changed and the measurable results improved demonstrably. The efforts seem to be worthwhile in view of the fact that less than 1 % of the total cost of care has been spent for this project.