Expanding the ACS children's surgery ecosystem: A blueprint for the children's surgery collaborative

Over the past 15 years, the American College of Surgeons (ACS) has fostered children's surgical quality improvement (QI) specifically through the National Surgical Quality Improvement Program–Pediatric (NSQIP-Ped) registry and the Children's Surgery Verification (CSV) Program. NSQIP-Ped was launched in 2011 as the first national clinical registry to systematically collect and benchmark pediatric surgical outcomes, and by 2025, has grown to over 150 participating sites. NSQIP-Ped provides participating hospitals with the data infrastructure needed to identify QI opportunities and monitor local QI efforts [1,2].