‘GO to Mum’: a QI project to keep mothers and babies together

This article presents a quality improvement (QI) project aimed at keeping mothers and babies together after delivery. The effectiveness of QI interventions in reducing the number of short-stay transfers of newborn term babies to the neonatal unit (NNU) due to grunting respirations is reviewed. An inter-departmental collaborative approach is described that resulted in the development of a novel programme to facilitate the safe monitoring of term newborn babies with grunting respirations in the labour and postnatal ward with their parents, averting transfer to the NNU.

Lavinia E. Raeside
Advanced Neonatal Nurse Practitioner
lavinia.raeside@ggc.scot.nhs.uk

Rhona Wilson
Advanced Neonatal Nurse Practitioner

Julie Gallagher
Charge Midwife, Labour Ward

Lesley Jackson
Consultant Neonatologist

Neonatal Unit, Royal Hospital for Children, Queen Elizabeth University Hospital, Glasgow

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Keywords

quality improvement; term respiratory admissions; maternal-infant separation

Key points

The implementation of evidence-based best practice resulted in a significant reduction in babies transferred to the NNU for short-stay review due to grunting respirations.
This prevented unnecessary separation of mother and baby following delivery.

Also published in Infant:

VOLUME 15/ISSUE 2, MARCH 2019

Quality improvement in the NICU: increasing the use of own mother’s milk

Human milk (HM), particularly own mother’s milk (OMM), is one of the highest impact, low cost interventions in the medical field with research constantly finding new and more impressive data to support this. OMM should be considered a medical intervention and an institutional priority, especially for those babies in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). However, no other medicine is administered, tracked or reported on as haphazardly as HM in the NICU.