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A baby’s environment is critical to their growth and development. Developmenal care strategies have been designed to reduce the stresses of the NICU for these infants as they are not yet ready for the world outside of their mother's womb. These strategies include a broad range of medical and nursing interventions1 which aim to provide an appropriate environment for each individual infant during this critical period in his or her neural development.
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Family-centered care (FCC) is a partnership approach to health care decision-making between the family and health care staff.2 This philosophy integrates the parents as part of the team and while the implementation of this philosophy may differ from hospital to hospital, the idea of placing the family members as primary care givers is consistent.
Care practices, such as family centered care, as well as the physical environment play a role in the infant's neurological outcomes. Understand how the neurosensory system develops and how external factors influence these outcomes.
Carole Kenner, founder and president of the Council of International Neonatal Nurses, discusses how the NICU culture has evolved in the past 30 years. She remembers the first NICU she worked in and talks about how different the environment was then. She reminds us that developmental care practices are just as important as other therapies and training should also be focused in this area.
Developmental care focuses on two key principles: first, family centred care, which emphasizes how important the parents are to the baby's development. Second, recognizing the signals given by premature babies in order to be able to respond to their needs. Print and post these 10 tips for your unit.
The concept of pro-developmental care addresses precisely this topic: reducing stress for the patients in the neonatal unit as much as possible. This should in turn promote both neural and physiological development. The aim is to reduce long-term consequences, for example, abnormal behaviour and cognitive disorders.
1 Sizun J, Westrup B. Early developmental care for preterm neonates: a call for more research. Archives of Disease in Childhood - Fetal and Neonatal Edition 2004;89:F384-F388.
2 Family-Centered Care: Current Applications and Future Directions in Pediatric Health Care. Matern Child Health J. 2012 Feb; 16(2): 297–305.