The initiative pauses but the work continues...

The final Newborn Hypoglycemia Prevention and Care learning session took place March 10, 2020 in Raleigh.  Dr. Jim DeVente, an obstetrician from Vidant Medical Center, gave the keynote presentation providing the teams with the obstetric perspective on neonatal hypoglycemia and prompting lively discussion.  With participating teams across North Carolina adopting the statewide hypoglycemia protocol over the last year, learned lessons were shared.  We learned it takes every unit across the Women's division to care for the mother-baby dyad adequately.  We learned it can take considerable amount of time to actively support breastfeeding, skin to skin, obtain blood glucoses, and administer gel. We were reminded nursing assignments need to adapt to this workload and an effective solution is the creation of staff acuity tools to provide nurses ample time to care for these families.  Finally, we learned standardizing a protocol is just one piece of a very intricate puzzle. The day ended with much discussion and agreement that this work must continue - teams will continue their efforts and collect data for one month in September 2020, to check on both the effects of improvements in care they are in the process of implementing as well as measure how well existing improvements in care have been sustained.