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TRAINING PARENTS TO WORK IN HOSPITALS BENEFITS PREMATURE BABIES
Parents of premature babies in intensive care units can be put to work providing basic nursing care – not to save hospitals money, but because it may help the babies get better. Newborns who get parental care seem to put on about 8 per cent more weight over a three-week period.
While most hospitals let parents stay with their babies in intensive care, they are often treated as visitors, says Karel O’Brien of Sinai Health System in Toronto.
Her team has investigated offering training to parents of premature babies, so they can take on some of their child’s care while in hospital. This included feeding, giving oral medicines, taking their temperature, and completing charts. However, some care, including giving injections, was reserved for medical staff only.
In a study of about 1800 babies born seven weeks early or more, the team found that after three weeks, babies whose parents underwent this training gained on average an extra 2 grams of weight a day when compared with similar babies at other hospitals.
To provide such care, participating parents had to be at the hospital for at least six hours per day, five days a week, and hospitals had to be able to give them somewhere to sleep.
It’s possible that parents are more likely to opt for this if they’re more attentive or committed in other ways, so the training and care itself may not be the cause of the babies’ improved weight-gain.
But as long as parental care doesn’t do any harm, it’s reasonable for hospitals to make it an option, says Chris Gale of Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London.
WILSON, Clare. Training parents to work in hospitals benefits premature babies. Disponível em: <https://www.newscientist.com/article/2160599-training-parents-to-work-in-hospitals-benefits-premature-babies/amp/>. Acesso em: 07/02/2018. Adaptado.
In “babies whose parents underwent this training gained on average an extra 2 grams of weight a day” (paragraph 4), the word “underwent” could be replaced by any of the expressions below, BUT
