Developmental Care Implementation on Preterm Neonates in Ain Shams University Pediatric Hospitals: An Interventional Study

Abstract

NICU admitted neonates experience multiple painful stimuli in the neonatal intensive care units like (needle breaking, suctioning, endotracheal intubation, heel pricking, exposure to excessive light and noise). Many studies revealed that frequent pain exposure in NICU may affect neuropsychiatric development of the neonates especially during the period of maximal brain development. Developmental care measures like (minimizing exposure to noise, light, proper skin to skin contact or kangaroo care, proper positioning, clustering of care and non nutritive suckling) were found to reduce neonatal pain experienced by neonates in the NICU and also reduce the liability of neurodevelopmental impairment in preterms. In this study our aim was to implement developmental care, assess the relation between it & length of hospital stay, time to achieve full feed, volume of full feed tolerated by the neonates and incidence of IVH, NEC & ROP. This study involved 80 neonates 20 of them were excluded due to sedative and analgesic intake during study period, no available breast milk & no continuous kangaroo care, major congenital anomalies, exposure to various stressful stimuli, hospital stay less than 5 days, rapid improvement & discharge as N.J.