Early intervention program of extreme preterm born infants, status report three years into the project

• Children born extremely preterm (e.g. before 28 gestational weeks, EPT) runs a greater risk of cognitive, motor and neurobehavioral impairment later in life, compared to children born at term. Moreover, being a parent of an EPT born child increases the probability of developing depression and posttraumatic stress disorder post-partum, as well as the premature birth may affect the parent-child interaction negatively. In an attempt to decrease the psychological and motoric negative impact of both the child and parents, our multi-professional team has developed an early intervention during the first year at home focusing om parent-child interaction of the EPT born children: Stockholm Preterm Interaction-Based Intervention, SPIBI (Baraldi et al., 2020a). The target of the RCT is 130 children and after 32 months 112 children has been included in the study, evenly distributed in the intervention group and control group. At children’s corrected age of one-year, parents from 14 of the first included families were interviewed about their experiences from the intervention program, resulting in a qualitative article. Three main themes of parental experiences of the first year at home emerged: child-related concerns (concerning child medical state, self-regulation and recovery), parental inner state (concerning loneliness, ambivalence and premature parental identity), and changed family dynamics (concerning the couple, siblings and intergenerational support). The parents from the  intervention group reported that the intervention had given them security, a sense that the interventionist has been knowledgeable and in some cases that the program was important but not necessary to them (Baraldi et al., 2020b). With 85% of the targeted subjects included it is clear that an extensive early home-visit intervention program is feasible in the Swedish context, even though the pandemic has slowed down the recruitment pace and has forced adjustments to be made such as the use of telemedicine, exclusion of toys in the follow-up process and intensified hygienic procedures.

Subject headings

MEDICIN OCH HÄLSOVETENSKAP  -- Hälsovetenskap -- Omvårdnad (hsv//swe)

MEDICAL AND HEALTH SCIENCES  -- Health Sciences -- Nursing (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Psykologi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Psychology (hsv//eng)

Keyword

psykologi

Psychology

Publication and Content Type

vet (subject category)

kon (subject category)