Abstract:

Objective This was a sub-grant of Family Integrated Care (FICare), a study aiming at helping parents of preterm infants become the team members in neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) under the supervision of NICU professionals. The objective was to study the effect of FICare in NICU on maternal stressfulness of hospitalized preterm infants, so as to find further evidence for the necessity of FICare in NICUs in China. Methods This was a self comparison study. The standardized parental stressfulness scoring for NICU (PSS: NICU) was conducted by the strategy of 'ante-FICare PSS:NICU - FICare - post-FICare PSS:NICU' by a well trained research nurse at 2 time points: before joining FICare, and the baby's discharge day after joining FICare. SPSS 20.0 software was used for the statistical analysis. Results Patients were all hospitalized preterm infants in the Third Xiangya Hospital of Central South University from April 2014 to October 2015. Five hundred and sixty infants met the inclusion criteria, 464 infants met the exclusion criteria, 32 infants met the dropping criteria, making the final sample size of this study be 64. Among the 64 infant-mother pairs, 40 were male infants with gestational age of (32.8±2.6) weeks and birth weight of (1 795±439) g. 4.7% infants were born with Apgar score< 7 at 5 min. The average age of mothers was (27.4 ± 5.6) years old. 51.5% of the mothers were above college educational level and less than 3.1% of the mothers were under middle school education. Before FICare, the average score was more than 3.5 in 2 out of 4 dimensions of PSS:NICU. After FICare, by the time of discharge, the average score was close to 2 in all 4 dimensions of PSS:NICU. The before and after FICare comparisons showed significant difference in general score［(4.00±1.08) vs (2.02±0.93)］, NICU sight & sound-related score ［(3.38±0.53) vs (2.18±0.25)］, treatment-related score ［(3.76±0.45) vs (2.42±0.20)］, and relationship & parental role-related score ［(3.44±0.36) vs (2.20±0.18)］ (t values were 12.124, 12.637, 11.471 and 10.879, respectively, and all P vaules were <0.001). Conclusion Maternal stressfulness and anxiety level of preterm infants in NICU is high, and it can be positively released by allowing mothers of preterm infants to do FICare in NICU.