Nursing intervention of mothers with premature infants

Nurses involved in maternal child health have expressed concern regarding mothers and their premature infants. Hospital policies have been modified to allow mothers to feed their premature infants after they have been removed from the Isolette. However, studies have been done which indicated that the mother's concern in caring for and handling her baby extended above and beyond the problem of establishing feeding patterns. The intent of the present study was to determine if special nursing intervention provided by the nurse, in allowing the mother to practice caring for her baby under supervision before leaving the hospital, would decrease the mother's anxiety and increase the baby's general health and well-being. This seemed to be an appropriate way of bridging the gap experienced by the mother of a premature infant due to the resulting separation period because of the baby's retention in the hospital after the mother's discharge. The method employed in an attempt to answer the question was to obtain a sample of mothers who had delivered premature infants. The mothers were divided into an experimental and a control group. The experimental mothers received special assistance from the researcher which brought them together in the hospital on the infant's day of discharge. The mother bathed, dressed and fed her baby and the researcher offered suggestions and elementary information concerning the infant. The control mothers received no special assistance from the nurse. Seven to ten days after the mother had taken her baby home, a public health nurse made a home visit. The nurse assessed the health of the baby on a special rating scale and the mother filled out a scale which rated her emotional equilibrium. Statistical analyses were done using an independent t_ test to correlate the scores of the two groups of mothers. The same kind of test was performed to correlate the baby's scores. The level of significance was greater than .10 on the F table for both correlations showing an insignificant difference. The public health nurse rank-ordered the mothers from most anxious" to "least anxious" and the babies from "most healthy" to "least healthy." A Mann-Whitney U test was performed. These results again were insignificant at the .10 level. A significant correlation (p<.05 level) was obtained when the mother's anxiety score was correlated with the baby's health rating. In other words, the most anxious mothers had the least healthy babies. Replication of the study is recommended using a larger sample of mothers. Special assistance provided over a longer time period might show a significant difference in the rating scale scores. A revision of the baby's scale may also be necessary.