Neonatal team recognised with prestigious award at Reason meeting

The team at University Hospital Wishaw received a highly prestigious award at the Reason neonatal conference that recognised their quality improvement initiative to reduce incidence of severe brain injury in preterm infants <30 weeks’ gestation.

Consultant neonatologist Dr Mahmoud Montasser led the project along with neonatal unit practice educator Michelle Brooks, occupational therapist Gill Currie and advanced neonatal nurse practitioner Jo Gallagher. Michelle says: “We presented our quality improvement work to the national neonatal conference and were delighted to win first prize. All the staff who contributed to this project should be so proud.

“We put together a multidisciplinary working group, which then became the implementation team. This consisted of doctors, nurses, midwives, the infant feeding team and occupational therapists. We worked together to overcome any potential issues with the main concern being our ability to facilitate skin-to-skin contact between parents and their babies. Following a test of change, staff education and the development of a parent information leaflet, we implemented the project in July 2020. We quite quickly started to see positive outcomes. In 2021, we managed to reduce significant intraventricular haemorrhage (IVH) by 30% in infants <30 weeks’ gestation and by 34% in infants <28 weeks’ gestation.”

Congratulations to the team!