Supporting family-integrated care for premature birth - Neonatal Nurse Taslima Choudhury shares her insights with the British Medical Journal
Neonatal Intensive Care nurse, Taslima Choudhury shared her insights with the British Medical Journal this month for World Prematurity Awareness Month on reducing separation between families and babies during their Neonatal Intensive Care journey. Parent involvement can become challenging when birth is premature, where babies often need additional support from clinicians and medical machines to ensure they become healthy enough to go home to their families.
Our Neonatal Services have been working hard to make hospital stays with them as short as possible, so that parents can experience those special moments with their child. At the hospital, elements of typical new born experiences are stolen from parents; such as kangaroo care, breastfeeding, expressing and planning baby care. Challenges that prevent premature babies from leaving the hospital are often from them needing to use mechanical ventilation and feeding nasogastric tubes to ensure they are healthy.
Through transitional care and parent support, our teams have been able to begin effectively weaning children from feeding tubes and use of mechanical oxygen concentrators, so that they can become healthy, without dependency upon hospital support and equipment. By providing parents with training and support on nasogastric tube feeding and using ‘Bili cocoons’, a form of light therapy that does not compromise the relationship between mother and baby; babies can go home with parents without as many factors that may impact family bonding.
Taslima Choudhury, Neonatal Nurse who spoke with the British Medical Journal said; “Babies have been shown to feed better when at home outside of the hospital environment which is why it is really important to share information and training with parents on how to care for their children after being in the hospital.
“Being a new parent is already a challenge and with an ill child, this can seem incredibly hard to create your own routine outside of a hospital environment. Being able to make those experiences less daunting is something that our Neonatal Services prides themselves on - reaching out to parents who can use a helping hand.”
Taslima also spoke with the British Medical Journal about the impact of COVID-19 on relationships between families at the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit and how Trust colleagues had to pivot their way of supporting families without adding the risk factor of COVID-19 to vulnerable babies.
“The challenges that parents have had to face has been intensified with COVID-19 restrictions, not only physically but emotionally. We find so much inspiration in the bravery of parents visiting our Neonatal Unit and are proud to be by their sides through it all.”
We’d like to say a big ‘thank you’ to our Neonatal teams across World Prematurity Awareness Month for their support and dedication in helping babies across our wards to return home to their families. You can read Taslima’s piece here in the British Medical Journal where she shares the challenges that our Women’s Hospital strive to overcome to ensure parents and babies are united. Read her British Medical Journal piece here