A pediatric death audit in a large referral hospital in Malawi.

The mortality rate for this pediatric referral center has dramatically decreased in the 6 years since the last published mortality data, but remains high. Areas identified for continued development include improved record keeping, improved patient assessment and monitoring, and more timely and reliable provision of testing and treatment. This study demonstrates that in low-resource settings, where reliable record keeping is often difficult, death audits are useful tools to describe the sickest patient population and determine factors possibly contributing to mortality that may be amenable to quality improvement interventions.