How can such a program be implemented?
It’s important to standardize the practice by gathering key stakeholders and empowering them to target certain objectives, take one step at a time, and develop a broad-based education program to teach everyone how to achieve the objectives. This is important for something like skin-to-skin contact, which involves the efforts of staff from many different areas (nurses from nursery, labor and delivery, NICU, etc.).
In addition, for quality improvement it is important to have some measure of the benchmarks you are targeting in order to measure success.
"A lot of the time, it’s just about getting everyone to the same table, having the same talk, and realizing the information is not that complicated, and that the practice is actually relatively easy to implement, even when it comes to very vulnerable babies in the NICU," he said.
Dr. Bhatt reported having no disclosures. Dr. Kim is on the speaker’s bureaus for Nestle Nutrition, Nutricia, Abbott Nutrition, and Medela, and has received honoraria or research grant support from Medela and GE Healthcare.