Skin-to-skin contact may reduce negative consequences of “the stress of being born”: a study on temperature in newborn infants, subjected to different ward routines in St. Petersburg

Infant medical trauma in the NICU is associated with serious and lasting consequences. Skin-to-skin contact (SSC) of infants with their parents is a nursing intervention that provides significant benefits and can mitigate the negative consequences of the infant’s traumatic experiences in the NICU. The purpose of this article is to explain how SSC aligns with the concept of trauma-informed age-appropriate care (TIAAC) in the NICU. The evidence supporting SSC will be reviewed and discussed using TIAAC as a framework. SSC is an effective and evidence-based care strategy that reduces the infant’s traumatic NICU experiences by improving parental proximity, attachment, and lactation; decreasing stress and pain; improving physiologic stability; supporting sleep; and enhancing neurologic outcomes.

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Study protocol: parents as pain management in Swedish neonatal care – SWEpap, a multi-center randomized controlled trial

BMC Pediatrics ◽

10.1186/s12887-020-02356-7 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 20 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Emma Olsson ◽

Martina Carlsen Misic ◽

Randi Dovland Andersen ◽

Jenny Ericson ◽

Mats Eriksson ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Randomized Controlled Trial ◽

Pain Management ◽

Controlled Trial ◽

Newborn Infants ◽

Neonatal Care ◽

Neonatal Pain ◽

Randomized Controlled ◽

Link Type ◽

Skin Contact ◽

Skin To Skin

Abstract Background During the first period of life, critically ill as well as healthy newborn infants experience recurrent painful procedures. Parents are a valuable but often overlooked resource in procedural pain management in newborns. Interventions to improve parents’ knowledge and involvement in infants’ pain management are essential to implement in the care of the newborn infant. Neonatal pain research has studied a range of non-pharmacological pain alleviating strategies during painful procedures, yet, regarding combined multisensorial parent-driven non-pharmacological pain management, research is still lacking. Methods/design A multi-center randomized controlled trial (RCT) with three parallel groups with the allocation ratio 1:1:1 is planned. The RCT “Parents as pain management in Swedish neonatal care – SWEpap”, will investigate the efficacy of combined pain management with skin-to-skin contact, breastfeeding and live parental lullaby singing compared with standard pain care initiated by health care professionals, during routine metabolic screening of newborn infants (PKU-test). Discussion Parental involvement in neonatal pain management enables a range of comforting parental interventions such as skin-to-skin contact, breastfeeding, rocking and soothing vocalizations. To date, few studies have been published examining the efficacy of combined multisensorial parent-driven interventions. So far, research shows that the use of combined parent-driven pain management such as skin-to-skin contact and breastfeeding, is more effective in reducing behavioral responses to pain in infants, than using the pain-relieving interventions alone. Combined parental soothing behaviors that provide rhythmic (holding/rocking/vocalizing) or orogustatory/orotactile (feeding/pacifying) stimulation that keep the parent close to the infant, are more effective in a painful context. In the SWEpap study we also include parental live lullaby singing, which is an unexplored but promising biopsychosocial, multimodal and multisensory pain alleviating adjuvant, especially in combination with skin-to-skin contact and breastfeeding. Trial registration ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT04341194) 10 April 2020.

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