Kangaroo Care Essay

Infants and parents are biologically tuned to become attached to each other and this attachment promotes the baby's survival. In the United States, Kangaroo cares a method of skin to skin, contact in which a newborn has lied face down between the mother's breast for an hour or so at a time after birth. In Africa, the baby is raised in a caring family atmosphere where there is an extended family to take care of the babies. The mother caries baby on her back while working and spends time taking and playing with the baby. In Mongolia, the mother gets very less time to spend with the baby as she has to run errands and most of the times she has to work away from the baby. The social interaction is only during a family get-together for the baby. In America and Japan, the babies are taken to the park, shopping malls and the music classes for them to be social also the grandparents visit them often. The babies living in the countryside and tribe have less strange anxiety than children in the city like Tokyo and San Francisco. Secure attachment is when faced with a stressful situation and the caregiver effectively comforts the

As I was talking with Allie and Alex, a couple who recently found out they are having a baby, what is their idea of child rearing I was quite surprised by their reply. After much discussion, my focused for them were their idea of child care; whose is responsible for night time feedings, and the benefit of nurturing a newborn, and how the newborn will affect their relationship (Kaakinen et al., 2015). Allie, the wife, explained that she will be off work for 12 weeks with the baby and that the first two weeks her mother will be down to help. Alex, the husband, explained that his job did not provide paternity leave, so that he will be working every day, but did request two weeks of vacation pay to be home with his wife and child.

These past couple of weeks working on the Mother Baby Care Unit have provided me with many opportunities to reflect on the care that I have be able to provide to each of my patients. In particular, one encounter that I found myself deeply reflecting on involved a situation in which I was assisting a patient who was struggling to breastfeed her daughter. For confidentiality purposes, this patient will be referred to as Rosie and her daughter will be referred to as Emily.

Special care and attention must be given to infants in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) because of their small size and the health complications they face. One particular challenge faced by health care professionals in the NICU is the management of pain for preterm babies. Preterm infants must undergo a wide range of tests, procedures, and, often, life-saving measures during their hospitalizations, which not only subjects them to pain, but pain-related stress and anxiety. This has an impact on the infants themselves, as well as on the family members and friends who are involved in their care (Smith, Steelfisher, Salhi, & Shen, 2012). The purpose of this paper is to examine the problem of pain management among preterm NICU patients and propose the implementation of kangaroo care as a pain management technique.

Group members are struggling with the many facets of having a NICU baby. This session will deal with some of the very common issues. Parents of NICU babies are often worried about how slowly their child may be progressing in comparison to other babies. This session the group will work through some of those progressions and regressions and help the parents to cope with this. Parents are sitting in the NICU for hours, watching other babies do things that their baby is not doing. However, this session will help show the parents that they are all doing this. Every parent in the group has likely been the parent on either end of that frustration/joy. Regression can be hard for parents and does happen often during a NICU stay. Group members may show some reluctant to talk about their child’s set-backs. They may be discouraged by them. Parents have a strong desire to know when their child will be discharged from the hospital. This can cause them to become upset when that does not happen (Pepler et. Al, 2012).

To help prevent this issue I have created a program for the Fairfax hospital Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) to facilitate the bond between mother and child while both are recovering and being cared for. The pilot program called “rooming-in” allows mother and child to be on the same private room where other family can also stay. The room will be designed to give maximum support to both mother and baby by having all resources in room as well as a private team of nurses.

Jace Sauseda Clinical Rotation Mrs. Ysaguirre 17 November 2015 NICU Clinical Report At the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit doctors, nurses, and all staff unite together with one primary goal for each new life they receive, that goal being to achieve the best outcome for each premature and critically ill baby. The NICU, at University Hospital, care for 600 infants annually. Inside is a 58-bed facility, offering the highest level care led by on-site neonatologist (University Health system). The (NICU) is specialized to care for premature infants (those less than 37 weeks gestation) as well as sick newborns.

Within every change there are issues that will need to be resolved, and that is why this paper discussed various strategies to overcome those challenges. Kangaroo Mother Care helps improve the health of preterm infants in the NICU, along with their parents. That is why it is crucial to implement the change, and start making a different in these infant’s

This qualitative study are gathering data on premature babies who are at high risks for neurodevelopmental and behavioral outcomes in the neonatal intensive care unit other known as NICU. The purpose of this research is to decrease their deficits in language, attention, cognitive development, communication delay and their executive functions. According to the researchers, to minimize the premature infants’ deficits is allowing constant maternal physical contact, verbal soothing, breastfeeding, odor and heat exchange and eye contacts in the NICU. Their main focus is to make sure the premature infants have constant access to their maternal figures to allow them to lower their odds of neurological deficits and behavioral outcomes and enrolling the premature into Family Nurture Intervention (FNI). FNI is a new intervention program designed to overcome their flawed effects of maternal separation and the NICU environment on the premature infant (Welch, M. G 1203).

There are seven main principles in the Neonatal Integrative Developmental Care Model: a healing environment, partnership with family, positioning and handling, safeguarding sleep, minimizing stress and pain, protecting skin, and optimizing nutrition. These seven measures are used to provide optimal health care, both long term and short term, for premature infants. One of the most important elements of healing for premature infants is skin to skin contact. The Neonatal Integrative Developmental Care Model includes neuroprotective techniques to produce a combination of neurological, physical, and emotional development and avoid the development of disabilities. Parents are able to restore their parent-infant attachment, in this model, which helps both infants and parents health. NICU staff are not taught the neuroprotective skills during their training but have to be further educated. In order to ensure an optimal NICU, all NICU staff should be taught these skills during their training. Developmentally supportive care should be seen as a necessity not as an option. Optimal health care for premature infants also depends on the leadership and passion of NICU staff. There needs to be role model staff members that will train and set a high standard for other NICU member. (Altimier, L., & Phillips, R.

Mothers’ experience of fathers’ support for breastfeeding is a qualitative study with open- and closed-ended questions interviews. 19 face to face interviews were done. Ten thematic categories were found. They are 1) Fathers supported the decision to breastfeed, 2) Multifaceted approach to breast-feeding preparation was helpful, 3) Mothers perceived fathers benefited from lactation consultant support, 4) Fathers felt helpless and disconnected from breast-feeding, 5) Mothers benefited from fathers’ emotional support, 6) Fathers provided physical support to mothers, 7) Mothers perceived fathers enjoyed being involved in the feeding process, 8) Challenges in breast-feeding, 9) Women need emotional support to make breast-feeding successful, 10)

The article “Kangaroo care in Pre-term and Low Birth Weight Babies in a Postnatal Ward” was written by Sarah Gregson and Jonathan Blacker and was published in the British Journal of Midwifery. This study was the first in the UK to investigate Kangaroo care for stable low birth weight infants and infants at risk for hypoglycemia in a transitional care/ postnatal ward setting. The purpose of this cohort study was to compare the effects of Kangaroo care (skin-to-skin contact with mother) on length of stay, feeding, and parent satisfaction for premature, low birth weight, and babies born to diabetic mothers versus standard care in the control group.

Kangaroo care is the act of placing a neonate skin to skin with their mother or father. This care is commonly provided by mothers but can also be provided by fathers. Paternal kangaroo care offers many benefits for both the father and the neonate. By implementing this care, the opportunity for fathers to bond with their neonate is provided. This bonding experience is important as many neonates spend several weeks in the NICU. The time away from their neonate can be particularly stressful for the family. Kangaroo care provides a means for the father to provide care for his neonate during their time in the NICU. The benefits to the neonate include maintaining greater temperature stability, stabilized heart rate, and respirations within

Kangaroo care began in “Bogota, Colombia as an intervention to maintain infant body temperature when incubators were not sufficient in the late 1970s. This method of holding infants skin to skin spread worldwide because of the reported benefits of this practice” (Lee & Bang, 2011). Kangaroo mother care is direct skin-to-skin contact between a neonate and their mother or father. This intervention will not only benefit the baby as previously stated, but also increase the bond between the parent and the infant and is of large benefit to the hospital; this is a low-cost intervention with evidence supporting its care. The PICOT statement for the proposed change of kangaroo mother care is: In preterm neonates who are less than 37 weeks old (P), does kangaroo mother care, which is defined as direct skin-to-skin contact with parent (I), compared to standard care, or incubator care (C), increase the neonate’s physiological vital signs, weight, decrease pain, and reduce rates of infection (O), over the course of their hospital

The article chosen is titled, “A comparison of kangaroo mother care and conventional incubator care for thermal regulation of infants.” Within this article, the author demonstrates the need for this study by emphasizing that no other research has compared kangaroo care to incubator care. The author believes that kangaroo care can be very beneficial, thus the reason the author chose to do a study to whether or not kangaroo care is effective for treating infants with hypothermia. The problem that the author was concerned about for this study was whether mothers would be willing to participate in the study. This was a problem for this study because most of the mothers wanted their infants to be in the nursery in an incubator rather