Sunday, Sep 26 - Expo Hall Opening
Sunday, Sep 26 - Job Fair
Monday,
Sep 27 - AWHONN's Block Party
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Title: The Mother/Baby Reunion Project: Ensuring Timely Reunion After Cesarean Birth
Discipline: Newborn (NB), Childbearing (CB)
Learning Objectives:
Submission Description:- Identify three advantages to early reunion of mothers and babies after cesarean section.
- Learn to evaluate the post-cesarean-section separation time in your institution.
- Learn to identify specific actions to improve timely reunion.
The Mother/Baby Reunion Project was a practice improvement pilot project carried out during June-July 2009 at The Women's Place at the University of Virginia Health System. It was designed and implemented by Sara Read and Lindsey Baskette (the project team) as a master's capstone project at the culmination of the Clinical Nurse Leader program at the University of Virginia. Baseline data collected by the project team indicated that birth-to-reunion time after cesarean section was three hours seven minutes for the first quarter of 2009. According to the CDC, the national c-section rate in 2006 was 31.8% and has been climbing steadily. Research shows that cesarean delivery is negatively associated with both initiation and quality of breastfeeding and can be considered a risk factor for impaired breastfeeding, indicating that women who deliver via cesarean require greater protection and support in their desire to breastfeed. Best-practice guidelines indicate that breastfeeding be initiated within the first two hours of life. Cesarean delivery also presents barriers to early mother/infant bonding, as well as true patient- and family-centered care. The Mother/Baby Reunion Project set a goal of reuniting healthy mothers and infants within two hours of birth by cesarean section. After consulting with nursing and medical leadership the team settled on two work process interventions to achieve this goal. The first was to initiate a call from the operating room or the post-anesthesia care unit (both located within The Women's Place) to the newborn nursery when the mother left the O.R. so that the infant could be brought to meet the mother in recovery. The second involved piloting new protocols allowing infant baths and radiant warming to be postponed in favor of expediting the reunion with the mother. While these new protocols were not strictly mandatory, they were explicitly supported by the unit leadership. Emails and flyers announcing the project were sent at the outset. The project team attended committee and staff meetings to share both the baseline data and the project goals. Small reminders were posted in the O.R., the P.A.C.U. and the newborn nursery. At the halfway point of the pilot the team gathered data which indicated improvement. This was shared widely with staff. At the end of the pilot period final data was collected showing an average birth-to-reunion time of two hours and four minutes. While substantial challenges to early reunion exist on the unit – both in terms of ingrained work patterns and the geographic layout of the unit – this project showed that gathering and sharing information and choosing small changes can create dramatic improvements in practice for virtually no cost. Key to the success of this project was a nuanced analysis of the unit as well as selection of incremental, measureable goals. While not a blueprint for every unit, the Mother/Baby Reunion Project is a demonstration of how carefully chosen small changes can yield big results.