Palliative care is a series of actions aiming to offer support to parents and their infants in order to improve their quality of life. Despite optimal outcomes, the provision of palliative care for infants and achieving these outcomes may be hardly feasible. The present study aimed to investigate the barriers to palliative care and gain insight into the solutions. Accordingly, the obstacles wer...

BACKGROUND High-risk infants transitioning from the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) to home represent a vulnerable population, given their complex care requirements. Little is known about errors during this period. PURPOSE Identify and describe homecare and healthcare utilization errors in high-risk infants following NICU discharge. METHODS This was a prospective observational cohort st...

V entilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) continues to be a disturbing problem in the care of intensive care unit (ICU) patients. Although much progress has been achieved in the past two decades, many issues remain unresolved, and mortality still reaches 30–40% [1, 2]. In this issue of the European Respiratory Journal, two contributions are devoted to VAP. Although quite divergent in scope, they a...

Purpose. The purpose of this study was to investigate the individual characteristics and perinatal outcomes of women who initiate prenatal care late in their pregnancy in the Tokyo metropolitan area. Methods. Retrospective study. The study enrolled all women at our hospital who initiated prenatal care after 22 weeks of gestation (late attenders) and control women who initiated prenatal care pri...

Improving the outcome of the infants cared for in one's neonatal intensive care unit is the main objective of improvement projects that are pursued independently or as a member of a national collaborative. Regional quality improvement collaborations represent the intersection of hospital-based and community-based medicine offering the possibility of coordinated improvement efforts conducted at ...

This article presents the elements of the Oral Motor Intervention section of the Infant Care Path for Physical Therapy in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). The types of physical therapy interventions presented in this path are evidence based as well as infant driven and family focused. In the context of anticipated maturation of suck-swallow-breathe coordination, the timing and methods f...