Teixeira-Poit Gets NIH Grant to Examine Influence of Neonatal Intense Treatment Unit Layout

EAST GREENSBORO, N.C. (Sept. 9, 2022) – Stephanie Teixeira-Poit, Ph.D., affiliate professor at the John R. and Kathy R. Hairston University of Well being and Human Sciences at North Carolina Agricultural and Specialized Point out University, has received a $568,960 Nationwide Institutes of Health (NIH) grant, “Identifying and Mitigating Health and fitness Disparities Pursuing a Neonatal Intensive Care Device Style and design Adjust from Open-Bay to Solitary-Family members Rooms.”

Neonatal intense treatment units (NICUs) are vital to delivering substantial-good quality treatment and making certain optimal wellness results for sick and premature newborns. Though NICUs began as open up bays with many toddlers admitted to big rooms of variable dimension, a rising trend in NICU design and style is solitary-family rooms with one newborn admitted per place and accommodations for at the very least one parent to continue to be with the infant.

A advantage of the single-loved ones space design is enhanced father or mother-toddler bonding time, nevertheless this assumes all mother and father can space-in with their toddlers. Study implies Black and minimal-money mothers and fathers may well encounter hardships, such as a absence of paid out maternity go away or transportation, that limit their chance to place-in at the frequency of white and economically privileged dad and mom.

The review will use knowledge from numerous sources to investigate no matter if affected individual sub-populations equally benefited from or were being unintentionally harmed by the NICU design modify. Some of this investigate will be carried out at Cone Health and fitness, which switched to solitary-spouse and children NICU rooms in 2020 at the Women’s & Children’s Heart at Moses Cone Medical center. By searching for probable impacts of the style and design transform, Cone Wellbeing is demonstrating its motivation to advertising health and fitness fairness and lowering health and fitness disparities amongst people. 

Teixeira-Poit’s analysis staff includes co-investigators Bonnie Fields, Ph.D., medical associate professor in A&T’s University of Nursing, and Marjorie Jenkins, Ph.D., director of nursing investigate at Cone Health and fitness. The workforce will carry out a mixed-approaches study that triangulates client wellness consequence info, patient expertise surveys and in-depth interviews with NICU team.

The NIH research will develop on the team’s earlier get the job done in a lesser pilot review sponsored by a $7,500 Daisy Basis Health Fairness Award. The Daisy-funded pilot review associated preliminary analyses of quantitative info and interviews with nurses that highlighted locations for even more exploration.

The workforce will at the same time examine irrespective of whether disparities in health outcomes and knowledge of treatment exist across client sub-populations, with distinctive interest to race, ethnicity and socioeconomic standing. The team also will collect and evaluate qualitative knowledge from clinicians and administrators to present loaded element on procedures that likely reproduce wellbeing disparities. Interviews will unearth limitations and expose approaches to mitigate unintended repercussions of the NICU style and design alter.

The new NIH funding is through the Support for Investigation Excellence (Sure) R16 application, which supports study capacity setting up at institutions that enroll sizeable figures of college students from backgrounds nationally underrepresented in biomedical investigation.