THE ESSENTIAL
- The rate of premature births is increasing in many developed countries.
- Prematurity rose from 5.9% of births in 1995 to 7.4% in 2010 in France.
Each year, between 50,000 and 60,000 children are born prematurely in France, according to theInserm. Often babies are forced to stay in the hospital and are therefore separated from their parents for several weeks.
To allow moms and dads to see their babies more often, the teams of a neonatal intensive care unit located in the United States decided to set up FamilyLink. It is a video conferencing program that allows families to see their baby whenever they want (24/7) via a secure connection from a computer, tablet or cellphone. This initiative aimed to assess the positive impact that videoconferencing could have on families and, especially, on mothers. The results were published in the journal Breastfeeding Medicine.
Feeding Your Premature Baby Breast Milk
To feed your premature baby when he cannot yet breastfeed, there are several techniques such as intravenous or nasogastric feeding, i.e. a tube is inserted through the nose or through the mouth and which descends directly into the baby’s stomach. Either way, the mother can provide the milk to feed the baby. She must then collect it at the hospital or at home, using a breast pump.
“Breast milk is an essential part of care for a hospitalized premature baby, but collecting it can be difficult due to several factors such as low milk production, having to collect it and not breastfeeding directly, but also the stress and anxiety of new parents who are physically separated from their premature babies in a hospital setting. In our study, we experimented with expressing milk while watching her hospitalized baby via videoconference”, explains Adrienne Hoyt-Austin, one of the authors. Indeed, mothers watched their babies on the screen at the same time as they expressed their milk.
A stronger bond and greater motivation to pump
The researchers then asked the 17 participants to complete questionnaires. Thus, they identified four main effects of these videoconference sessions. First of all, seeing her baby on a screen reinforces the bond and the connection between the mother and her baby. Second, videoconferencing gave women more motivation to pump their milk, with some believing that video was a “visual reminder: I’m doing this for the baby”.
The third observation of the researchers is a little more negative: the videoconference reminds the participants that they are separated from their infant. “I felt a little guilty seeing him, I felt like I should be there (in the hospital) instead of being away”, said one participant. Finally, last impact: videoconferencing connects the whole family to the hospitalized infant, allowing to present it to the other members who could not go to the hospital.