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Loyola Nurses Help Premature Babies Transition from Intensive Care to Home

When a baby is born much earlier than expected and needs special care in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), the parents’ lives are turned upside down. Overnight, their primary focus becomes their baby’s progress. At the same time, they are challenged to take care of their home, jobs and other children.

Some parents would jump at the chance to bring their baby home a week or two sooner from the NICU to begin putting their lives back together. Loyola’s neonatal home care program makes that earlier transition to home possible for many families, if they choose to take advantage of the option.

The nurses who care for babies in Loyola’s NICU are the same ones who make home care visits. The level of expertise and continuity of care they provide are the main factors that have made Loyola’s neonatal home care program a national model, according to Marc Weiss, M.D., medical director of the home care program.

The program is ideal for babies who have grown and developed to the point where they no longer need high-tech NICU care. The support they do need, their parents can learn to provide at home. Many are still in transition from tube feeding to mouth feeding. Some need oxygen therapy. Some babies need intravenous medications that nurses can administer at home. Through the home care program, an NICU nurse typically visits a baby and parents at home one to three times a week to check on the baby’s progress and answer questions.

Adrian and Bill Belmonte got to know NICU nurse Jeanette Cronin, R.N., B.S.N., when their premature twins were struggling with multiple health problems in the NICU for two months. That relationship grew stronger while Cronin supported the family at home. The babies, Alexis and Will, were still tube feeding when they went home. Alexis had a particularly difficult time transitioning to a bottle. Cronin supported the new mom through the trial and error, daily frustrations and slow learning process that some babies must go through to learn the coordination of breathing, sucking and swallowing.

“Jeanette was my lifesaver,” Belmonte said. “At one point she was here every day, and she was available by pager at any time. Having home health care made a world of difference for us.”

In the six years since it was launched, the neonatal home care program has documented the positive results of putting babies who are ready into their home environments and in the care of their parents a little bit sooner. They gain weight better and are not re-admitted to the hospital more frequently than babies who stay longer in the NICU, according to Weiss.

Better weight gain happens in part because parents have more time and their own comfortable space to learn their baby’s feeding cues at home. The close, consistent contact with parents yields other benefits that can’t be measured, like a stronger emotional bond.

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