Utilizing Education to Increase the Use of Kangaroo Care with Term Infants

The current practice at our institution for managing newborn thermoregulation is by use of the radiant warmer in the newborn nursery.  This practice separates newborns from their mothers. In order to decrease the length of time mothers are separated from their newborns, the literature suggests the use of kangaroo care to manage thermoregulation in place of the radiant warmer. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether the implementation of education for nurses about kangaroo care will increase the usage of kangaroo care to manage thermoregulation. A group of mother-baby nurses formed an evidence-based practice (EBP) project team to review published, peer-reviewed literature on the topic of thermoregulation and kangaroo care for full-term newborns.  The Johns Hopkins Nursing Evidence Based Practice Model was used to guide the project team through the evidence-based practice process.  Through this process, the nurses learned that the benefits of kangaroo care include: increased parent-newborn bonding, increase in breastfeeding, reduction in crying, and the stabilization of blood sugar, core body temperature, heart rate, and blood pressure. By completing an overall summation of the literature, the project team identified kangaroo care to be the best practice for managing thermoregulation in the newborn and promoting the parent-newborn bond. Based on the literature, the nurses translation strategies included changes to nursing polices, changes to newborn documentation that incorporated kangaroo care as an option for thermoregulation and education for bedside clinicians caring for our mother-newborn couplets. Education provided to the nursing staff included a self-learning packet that required reading an article about skin-to-skin treatment for newborn hypothermia and completing a written test. This was followed by the nurses attending an instructor led in-service that included the benefits of kangaroo care, how the York Hospital policies supported kangaroo care, demonstration of the proper technique and documentation of kangaroo care. A non-experimental comparative design was used to evaluate the nurse’s practice of managing thermoregulation before and after education about kangaroo care.  A self-reporting survey was given pre-education and then 3 months post-education to identify changes in practice. The results of this EBP project are pending completion of the 3 month post-education survey that will be analyzed October 2007. The hope is that the “many voices” of nurses participating in evidence-based practice will influence the “one mission” of providing care that keeps mothers and newborns together.