Nursing? Infant Care

JustBeachyNurse, LPN · Jul 21, 2012

It depends on why the parents are unable to do so, but nearly all the time it's a relative. Dad if mom's too ill to care for the child. Grandparents, aunts, uncles. Most hospitals are baby friendly units where there is no nursery except for the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) where everything is vastly different for these medically fragile newborns and preemies than a typical newborn infant.

sweatpea23 · Jul 21, 2012

Thanks, what about in the NICU?

JustBeachyNurse, LPN · Jul 21, 2012

NICU would usually be the critical registered nurses assigned to the patient (at least one but some critically ill infants are 2 or 3 n nurses to one patient. Generally these patients are fed via nasogastric tube and require minimal motion and physical contact as it can impair their ability to grown and heal. Diaper changes are often completed at the same time as other procedures such as catheter changes, vital signs assessments, ventillator adjustments and others to minimize stress to these fragile infants. Once these babies are strong enough to be diapered and fed via bottle the parents are the first choice caregivers, especially since this may be the first time the parents get to touch their child.

My patient & his siblings were NICU babies for 8 weeks, 10 weeks, and 13 weeks. Mom didn't get to touch the strongest baby until nearly 4 weeks! As soon as he was strong enough to start to wean from the NG tube feeds, the nurses waited for the parents for the first feeding as there was a lot of patient/parent education to be completed. Plus it was such a huge milestone that the parents deserved to be a part of. My patient's mother speaks fondly of how the NICU nurses went out of their way for her & her husband to be able to feed their babies for the first time...