Primary Nursing Protocol in the NICU

In many NICUs, primary nurses are used to provide consistent care to infants and their families. Primary nurses are a group of bedside RNs who are assigned to specific patients in the NICU. Primary nursing has been shown to positively impact documentation such as medication errors, feeding quality scores, and parent satisfaction scores. Many units allow parents to choose several nurses to be their infant's primary, but unfortunately there is very little protocol set in place to educate these parents about the reasons why primary nursing is so important; thus, primary nurses are underutilized.