nasogasatric feeding practices!

[Leofric]

hello everyone!

I am just interested to get some views on practice in your respective units. We use a 2 ml syringe to aspirate stomach then a 10ml to give feeds. Most people do gravity feeds but i prefer to slow push them.

i dont know of any evidence for these practices and am interested in how other units do this etc.

also, we change our (vygon) ngt's 5 daily, again, not evidence based... thanks, look forward to hearing back... leo (uk)

[Gompers, BSN, RN]

We use 24% sucrose for any kind of uncomfortable procedure - NGs, heelsticks, IVs, catheters, etc. The only thing is they want us to only use it on extubated babies - it is possible to give it to intubated babies on their pacifiers since it's just drops at a time, but they worry about excessive saliva and possibly aspiration so we don't do it. We also are not to use it on any baby with NEC or even r/o NEC because the increased sugar that ends up in the gut isn't a good idea with a possible gut infection.

As for NGs, we use the 30-day ones. Size depends on where the tube is placed and what it's used for. Just for feedings, we'll use nasal insertion and kids under 1500 grams usually have a 5fr, over that weight a 6.5fr tube unless the baby has a tiny nose, and if it's a huge kid we might use an 8fr. If the baby is on Vapotherm or CPAP, we'll use a size up from usual and place it orally - we like to use a bigger tube in these cases and leave it racked between feedings for gastric decompression.

We hang most of our feeds to gravity. We usually just use pumps for continuous feeds, but sometimes we'll use them on kids with bad reflux and run the feeds over one hour. Once in a while we'll get a baby who doesn't so much have reflux but for some reason it take AGES for their feedings to go down, so we'll put those on a pump as well.