Skin To Skin: Nursing "Buy-In" and Results On Exclusive Breastfeeding
Title: Skin To Skin: Nursing "Buy-In" and Results On Exclusive Breastfeeding
- Discuss strategies to optimize the couplet's skin to skin experience.
- Identify system challenges to implementation of skin to skin in a large, center city teaching institution.
- Identify the significance of evidence based practice nursing research on patient care outcomes.
The purpose of this poster is to discuss strategies utilized by a large urban teaching institution to initiate and optimize the practice of skin-to-skin with the interdisciplinary care team. Implementation of this practice change proposed to increase the exclusive breastfeeding rate and overall breastfeeding rate during the inpatient stay.
Proposed change:
While staff were cognizant of the importance of skin to skin as well as the health benefits from exclusive breastfeeding, they still believed there would be issues with thermoregulation and glycemic control, even though this is not supported in the literature.
Implementation, outcomes and evaluation:
Through implementation of an extensive educational program for the staff, competency validation, and monitoring neonatal temperatures and glucose values, data demonstrated no issues of thermoregulation or glycemic control. In addition, the practice of skin-to skin as a standard of care for all stable, healthy newborns increased the exclusive breastfeeding rate approximately 16%.
Implications for nursing practice:
This positive impact on breastfeeding has created a positive impetus to move forward with the application to become a Baby Friendly Hospital.
Keywords:
- Skin-to-skin
- Breastfeeding
- Exclusive breastfeeding
- Thermoregulation
- Hypoglycemia
- Baby Friendly