When you are the mother or father of a premature baby, it is common for many unexpected feelings to appear: surprise, anguish, nervousness, fear, confusion and even guilt. The time a baby spends in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), It is usually a difficult time for the whole family, while waiting for your baby to continue growing and developing to be able to go home.
Although there are visiting hours in hospitals, there are more and more in those who begin to have flexibility so that parents can spend more time with their babies. And we hope this continues like this, because a new study found that When parents are directly involved in the care of a premature baby in the NICU, both get great emotional and physical benefits.
The study
Published in The Lancet, an essay in Australia, New Zealand and Canada showed that babies of parents who took part in care during their stay at the NICU gained more weight and were breastfeeding more consistently, than those who were only cared for. the hospital staff.
The study included 26 hospitals in all three countries and about 1,800 premature babies, which were divided into two groups: one where their parents helped nurses with the care of their children, and another where they only attended the NICU as visitors.
The parents of the first group they had to spend six hours a day for five days every week in the NICU and they were trained so they could help the nurses. Among the activities they did with their babies was bathing, feeding, dressing, changing their diaper, giving them oral medications and taking their temperature. They were also encouraged to make decisions about the treatment of their children and keep records of their growth and progress.
After 21 days, babies who were in the first group they had gained more weight and showed a higher level of daily weight gain, than those who were only cared for by nurses.
But the benefits do not remain only in babies, since it was found that the parents of the first group had lower levels of stress, and that mothers could breastfeed their children more regularly -between six and seven shots a day- compared to those in the group where parents only attended as visitors.
Karel O'Brien, one of the researchers of the study says that the way in which care is taken towards the family and not only towards the baby, has a positive effect on everyone's well-being: "Many parents are seen only as visitors to the ICU. Our findings challenge that approach and show the benefits for babies and their families by incorporating parents as key members in the baby's health care team, and by helping parents assume their role as primary caregivers as soon as possible.".
This coincides with the results of another study that I shared a few days ago, in which I said that fathers were stressed more than mothers, when they had to go home after their baby was discharged from the NICU, since that just one of the suggestions given by the researchers was that parents become more involved in the care of babies during their stay in the hospital.
