Developmental Care Specialist

Specialties NICU

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Specializes in Neonatal.

If your unit has a dedicated developmental care specialist can you share with me what the education requirments are for this position and what their job responsibilities are? I'm hoping to create this position for my unit and would love to have some basics to present with the job description.

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Specializes in RN, BSN, CHDN.

Welcome to allnurses

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Specializes in NICU.

Our unit has one! She's called the Parent Resource Nurse though, but basically she is a developmental care specialist. I'm not sure about the education requirements but she used to be a nicu RN, with many years of experience. She does weekly education sessions with parents about baby positioning and handling for ideal development, baby bottling, CPR classes for parents bringing baby home, car seat positioning and a whole bunch of other baby development-related information. She's also responsible for organizing our RSV injections, which baby qualifies for it, etc (I work in Canada). She also works with social work a lot, and attends family meetings and organizes gatherings/reunions of our nicu graduates and parents.

Hope that helped. :)

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Specializes in NICU.

We used to have them, and they were sent for NIDCAP training. They were all regular NICU nurses who went for the training and then had a certain number of their hours earmarked for developmental work.

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Specializes in Neonatal.

Thank you all for your responses

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