Document Type

Dissertation

Degree

Doctor of Nursing Practice

Major

Nursing

Date of Defense

7-9-2024

Graduate Advisor

Dr. Charity Galgani

Committee

Dr. Charity Galgani

Dr. Michelle Barrier

Dr. Jennifer Hawn

Abstract

Skin-to-skin contact during the golden hour is a practice that has numerous health benefits following the delivery of a newborn. These benefits include a healthy transition to extrauterine state, initiation of breastfeeding, thermoregulation, and more. However, the mode of delivery affects how often this practice is done. Parents who deliver vaginally are routinely offered the opportunity to perform skin-to-skin immediately after delivery whereas birth parents who deliver by cesarean section are not always offered this same benefit due to various reasons. A quality improvement project was conducted on an 18-bed labor and delivery unit at a Midwest hospital. This project followed a descriptive, observational, and pre-post-test design. The goal was to evaluate the rates of skin-to-skin contact documented within two hours after birth and the time to initiation of skin-to-skin contact between April and May 2024 on all non-emergent, term cesarean births for one month following implementation of the infant securement device in the OR. The total number of participants for this study was n=32. The results showed that the rates of skin-to-skin increased from an average of 46% between January to April to 70% in May 2024 post-implementation. The results also showed that in April 2024, the time to initiation was approximately 51.50 minutes before implementation and in May 2024, for participants who used the infant securement device, the time to initiation was approximately 12 minutes. These findings yielded positive, significant results with a p = 0.014 for the rates of skin-to-skin contact and a p

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