Speech Therapy Intervention on the Newborn with Associated Pathologies and Oral Feeding Disorder in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit
Sara Panizzolo, Giulia Nicolosi
The Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) is a highly complex care ward that welcomes not only premature infants, but also full-term infants with neurological, cardiac, respiratory, gastrointestinal and malformative pathologies, and syndromic infants. One of the main criteria for the discharge of the newborn from the NICU is having reached effective, complete, safe and independent oral feeding (American Academy of Pediatrics, Position Statement 2008-2011), and the difficulty in the transition from enteral feeding with a nose tube to natural and/or artificial oral feeding still today represents one of the most frequent causes of postponed discharge, with increased health costs for the National Health Service and discomfort for the newborn, for the mother and for the whole family. The speech and language pathologist, in close collaboration with a multidisciplinary team, is the competent healthcare professional in charge of providing early care for already hospitalised newborns who present oro-motor disorders and signs of dysphagia. This study aims to reiterate the importance of the presence of the speech and language pathologist in NICU, and to preliminarily support the hypothesis that oral-motor intervention (OMI), studied only on the population of healthy premature newborns and strongly supported by researchers, may also be effective for newborns with pathologies, i.e. premature and/or full-term newborns with associated medical conditions. The case report describes the speech therapy intervention carried out on a full-term newborn with associated pathologies and oral feeding disorder, hospitalised at the NICU of the Monaldi Hospital in Naples.
Keywords
Oral motor intervention, Preterm infants, Oral feeding disorders in premature infants.
