One Woman's Experience of Skin-to-Skin Care With Her Extremely-Low-Birth-Weight Neonate

To explore one woman's perceptions of her unique experience of skin-to-skin care (SSC) with her extremely-low-birth-weight (ELBW) neonate who was not expected to survive.

Holistic single-case study.

A Level 1 trauma metropolitan academic medical center located in a major urban city in the Southeastern United States.

One woman who provided SSC to her ELBW neonate who was not expected to survive.

We conducted an open-ended, semistructured virtual interview that lasted approximately 35 min. We used qualitative inductive content analysis to identify shared meaning with codes and code categories to inductively arrive at the development of subthemes and themes.

We identified two themes. The first, Worst Night of My Life, included two subthemes: Medical Futility and Fear. The second theme, Babies Need Their Moms, included two subthemes: Indispensable Mother-Infant Connection and Coping. The health care team who anticipated withdrawal of care facilitated SSC for palliative purposes. Extended SSC contributed to a complete reversal of the neonate's prognosis, evidenced by improved vital signs and blood gas, decreased oxygen requirements, and subsequent survival.

Health care teams should treat SSC as a foundational therapeutic necessity and offer it to ELBW neonates, even those who would traditionally be deemed too unstable. Nurses should address barriers to enculturate SSC as a standard treatment for ELBW neonates in the NICU. Future researchers should further investigate parental perceptions of SSC experiences to expand the transferability of these findings.