Best practice peri-extubation bundle reduces neonatal and infant extubation failure after cardiac surgery.

Introduction: Extubation failure after neonatal cardiac surgery is associated with increased intensive care unit length of stay, morbidity, and mortality. We performed a quality improvement project to create and implement a peri-extubation bundle, including extubation readiness testing, spontaneous breathing trial, and high-risk criteria identification, using best practices at high-performing centers to decrease neonatal and infant extubation failure by 20% from a baseline of 15.7% to 12.6% over a 2-year period.

Methods: Utilising the transparency of the Pediatric Cardiac Critical Care Consortium database, five centres were identified as high performers, having better-than-expected neonatal extubation success rates with the balancing metric of as-expected or better-than-expected mechanical ventilation duration. Structured interviews were conducted with cardiac intensive care unit physician leadership at the identified centers to determine centre-specific extubation practices. Data from those interviews underwent qualitative content analysis which was used to develop a peri-extubation bundle. The bundle was implemented at a single-centre 17-bed cardiac intensive care unit. Extubation failure, defined as reintubation within 48 hours of extubation for anything other than a procedure, ventilator days and bundle compliance was tracked.

Results: There was a 41.4% decrease in extubation failure following bundle implementation (12 failures of 76 extubations pre-implantation; 6 failures of 65 extubations post-implementation). Bundle compliance was 95.4%. There was no difference in ventilator days (p = 0.079) between groups.

Conclusion: Implementation of a peri-extubation bundle created from best practices at high-performing centres reduced extubation failure by 41.4% in neonates and infants undergoing congenital heart surgery.