Web Cam in the NICU

[BabyNurse513]

I took a class this week for some CEU's and one of our speakers gave a talk on Family Centered Care. She said she recently visited a NICU (in NC I think) which has all private rooms. In every room there is a web cam in the room so the parents can see the baby, and the nurse 24/7. She said there were about 3 other NICU's in the country trying this approach but I am really turned off by this idea. She was all about it, thought is was great but I think they are way to many implications to letting the parents have 24 hour access to what is going to outweigh the benefits. She said the nurses at that hospital really liked it though they were skeptical at first. Does anyone work in a unit that does this? Am I the only one who thinks this is not such a great idea?

~Lisa

[fergus51]

I have never heard of this. As long as it is in private rooms, I don't have too much of a problem with it, but I can see how the already out of control families could be made even worse with it.

[dawngloves, BSN, RN]

Yikes! What if they click on just as their baby is being tubed? Or watching several people try and start a line on the kid.Heaven forbid, watching from the office as the kid codes!

[RN4NICU, LPN, LVN]

I have never heard of this. As long as it is in private rooms, I don't have too much of a problem with it, but I can see how the already out of control families could be made even worse with it.

That was my first thought as well, re: the out of control families.

[BittyBabyGrower, MSN, RN]

Oh, the kooks would LOVE that! I don't know about that, I think I would be uncomfortable. You'd really have to be careful with hippa (is their sound???) if a co-worker came in to ask about another patient.

[BabyRN2Be]

I did work in a hospital which had a camera on the baby which fed into the mom's postpartum room. This was back in the days in which a vag delivery was a 3 day stay (4 days if you could drum up a pathetic look for your doc ) and a c-section was a minimum of 7 days, but of course, this was WAY before they had webcams. If the baby started going down the tubes, or they did procedures that they would not want the family to watch, they'd turn off the feed.

Hopefully they'd do the same thing in the case of webcams.

I'm surprised that they would do this, in the days of HIPAA and all. Of course, it was mentioned that they were all private rooms.