You are to be applauded for advocating for that precious baby and mother, allowing them an opportunity for physical closeness and bonding that they have been seriously deprived of. Does your co-worker really think that his IV would have been safer with him thrashing about the isolette?
Please don't take my response as an attack on anyone (although I would like to choke your co-worker for making such a stupid accusation). This is a hot-button topic for me.
My first job as a new grad was in a large and very well-respected NICU in Chicago. I worked there (happily) for 2-1/2 years unti lhubby was transferred to another mid-western city, where I was hired into the only NICU in town. I quickly came to realize that I was working in an entirely different world. Virtually everything I had been taught or learned in Chicago was frowned upon in the new NICU. Treatment protocols were vastly different. Nursing was not respected by the physicians or hospital administration. Nurses did not think or act independently, even in areas of care such as growth and development that were better suited to nursing intervention and ignored by medicine.
One day, shortly after completing orientation, I was assigned to a baby with a fatal condition whose parents had been coerced into consenting for surgery for a non-life-threatening "defect". It was no surprise to anyone (other than the parents) that he was not weaning off the ventilator post-operatively. It was beginning to look like the poor child wold die in the NICU without ever having been held by his parents. The mother arrived that day (from the referral hospital) and wanted to hold her baby. In Chicago, we routinely allowed parents to hold their intubated nfants and practice kangaroo care if the baby's condition allowed. It never occurred to me to tell these parents that they couldn't hold their baby, so I got him out of the isolette, taped up his vent tubing, snuggled him up in his adoring parents' arms in a rocking chair, and moved a few beds away to give them some privacy. At that precise moment, a do-gooder nurse who had no reason to be in our room walked in and had a fit that they were holding their intubated baby, grabbed the child from the parents, and practically extubated him jamming him back into the isolette.
Needless to say, she and I had words. What I regret to this day, 20 years later, was that his parents were so fearful that they did not hold him again until he was weaned from the vent, days later. What a pointless waste of precious time.
You did the right thing. The baby's mother and I thank you
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