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Promoting safe sleep to decrease sudden unexpected infant death is challenging in the hospital setting. Concern for adherence to safe sleep practice across inpatient units at a large pediatric hospital. Used quality improvement methodologies to promote safe sleep across all units. Development of a multidisciplinary expert group, hospital-wide guidelines, targeted interventions, and bedside audits to track progress. Adherence to safe sleep practices improved from 9% to 53%. Objects in the crib were a major barrier to maintaining a safe sleep environment. Safe sleep practices were less likely to be observed in infants with increased medical complexity (p =.027). Quality improvement methodology improved adherence to infant safe sleep guidelines across multiple units. Medically complex infants continue to be a challenge to safe sleep. Therefore, ongoing education for staff and further research into best practices for the most complex infant populations are necessary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Assess differences in approaches to and provision of developmental care for infants undergoing surgery for congenital heart disease.Study Design: A collaborative learning approach was used to stratify, assess, and compare individualized developmental care practices among multidisciplinary teams at 6 pediatric heart centers. Round robin site visits were completed with structured site visit goals and postvisit reporting. Practices of the hosting site were assessed by the visiting team and reviewed along with center self-assessments across specific domains including pain management, environment, cue-based care, and family based care coordination.Results: Developmental care for infants in the cardiac intensive care unit (CICU) varies at both a center and individual level. Differences in care are primarily driven by variations in infrastructure and resources, composition of multidisciplinary teams, education of team members, and use of developmental care champions. Management of pain follows a protocol in most cardiac intensive care units, but the environment varies across centers, and the provision of cue-based infant care and family-based care coordination varies widely both within and across centers. The project led to proposed changes in clinical care and center infrastructure at each participating site.Conclusions: A collaborative learning design fostered rapid dissemination, comparison, and sharing of strategies to approach a complex multidisciplinary care paradigm. Our assessment of experiences revealed marked variability across and within centers. The collaborative findings were a first step toward strategies to quantify and measure developmental care practices in the cardiac intensive care unit to assess the association of complex inpatient practices with long-term neurodevelopmental outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study explores the effects of exposure to maternal voice on infant sucking in preterm infants. Twenty-four preterm infants averaging 35 weeks gestational age were divided randomly into two groups. A contingency between high-amplitude sucking and presentation of maternal voice was instituted for one group while the other group served as a yoked control. No significant differences were observed in sucking of the two groups, but the degree of pitch modulation of the maternal voice predicted an increase in the rate of infant sucking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]