Being born early can cause a number of health problems in babies, such as loss of body heat, having a harder time feeding, or getting infections more often.
And to help overcome them, there is a wonderful natural medicine: skin-to-skin contact with Mom. Its benefits are countless for premature babies: it improves their neurodevelopment, heart rate and breathing. The smell, the mother’s voice and her heartbeat recreate the sensations that the baby receives inside the uterus and soothes it. This means that babies sleep more, feed better, digest better and improve their neurological development.
Hence, most maternity wards try to facilitate kangaroo care between mother and newborn, even in NICUs or with highly medicalized children. This is what they do at the Vall d’Hebron University Hospital in Barcelona, where they have achieved that the premature triplets Roc, Aleix and Arai, can enjoy skin-to-skin contact at the same time with their mother, while they continue with oxygen therapy to improve their neurodevelopment
The kangaroo method, essential for premature babies
According to data from the Spanish Society of Neonatology (SENeo), in Spain some 29,000 premature babies are born each year, that is, before week 37. They represent 75% of hospital admissions in neonates. And Roc, Aleix and Arai, are three of them.
The siblings were born on March 20 at the Vall d’Hebron University Hospital at 28 weeks of gestation, when their mother broke her water, about 60 days before what is considered a full-term pregnancy. As they were triplets, both the parents and the medical team already counted on the early delivery, but not so many days, as explained by Dr. Fèlix Castillo, head of Neonatology at the hospital center:
“In a triplet pregnancy, the volume triples and this causes the gestation to not reach 40 weeks, delivery is calculated for 34 weeks.”
The first to be born was Roc, with 1,280 kilos; the second, Aleix, with 1,180 kilos, and the last, Arai, who weighed 1,200 kilos. Being premature and weighing less than 2.5 kilos, the kangaroo method was indicated for all three, which recreates the sensations that the baby perceives when in the womb and which, as explained in the Vall Neonatology Service d’Hebron, promote whenever possible.
The challenge was that the mother could perform the kangaroo method with her three children simultaneously , who also require high-flow oxygen therapy and are connected to a machine. But, as Dr. Castillo explains, the nursing team managed to achieve this: they placed an extra oxygen cylinder to ensure the supply of oxygen and that they did not make hypoxia or apnea, and thus they managed to benefit the three premature children of intimate skin-to-skin contact with the mother.
The kangaroo method is a basic practice of care within the Vall d’Hebron Neonatology Service, which works to give early discharges and advances to complete the project “With you, like at home”, which wants to place families in the center of neonatal care.
The objective of this initiative is to make individual rooms available to families so that they can become familiar with the coexistence and needs of children. This new space, which has already begun to be built, will allow further research on the benefits provided by the active participation of families in care. And it is that this contact also involves the father from the first minute, since it has benefits for the babies in both cases. That means that any initiative to promote it is welcome.
Track and photo | Vall d’Hebron University Hospital
In Babies and More | Family rooms in the neonatal ICU of the Hospital 12 de Octubre: pioneering initiative in Spain, ‘Zero separation, Together for better care!’: Campaign not to separate the baby in the NICU from its parents, during Covid-19
