Information for Healthcare Professionals
This section contains information that may be helpful to you in your practice, such as care guidelines, information about upcoming CME programs and directions in neonatal research. If you have comments or suggestions, please contact us at any time.
Clinical education opportunities
Neonatal Outreach Program
Research
Neonatal research
Skin-to-skin Contact (Kangaroo Care)
Many studies of skin-to-skin care (SSC) have been conducted and published during the past 20 years. Among the many benefits to infants and parents are:
- Improvement of the infant's immediate health status
- Physiologic stability in the infant
- Improvement in the infant's gas exchange
- Improvement in the infant's heart rate
- Decreased episodes of infant apnea (although heart rate variability during transfer to SSC indicates that more research is needed in this area)
- No adverse effect on infant thermoregulation
- Potential positive impact on infant weight gain
- More organized sleep and wakefulness behaviors, with more time in the quiet sleep and alert wakefulness states
- Shorter hospital stays
- Decreased severity of infections
- Improvement in neurological development
Guidelines for intubated infants
Guidelines for non-intubated infants