Teixeira-Poit Receives NIH Grant to Study Influence of Neonatal Intensive Treatment Device Layout

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

Neonatal intense treatment models (NICUs) are crucial to supplying significant-top quality care and guaranteeing best well being results for ill and untimely newborns. Despite the fact that NICUs began as open bays with several infants admitted to large rooms of variable sizing, a developing craze in NICU design and style is one-family members rooms with 1 child admitted for each space and accommodations for at the very least just one guardian to remain with the infant.

A reward of the solitary-loved ones space structure is amplified guardian-toddler bonding time, yet this assumes all moms and dads can space-in with their toddlers. Investigate suggests Black and reduced-cash flow mother and father may perhaps practical experience hardships, these as a deficiency of compensated maternity go away or transportation, that limit their possibility to area-in at the frequency of white and economically privileged parents.

The examine will use facts from various resources to examine no matter whether individual sub-populations equally benefited from or were unintentionally harmed by the NICU style and design improve. Some of this investigation will be done at Cone Well being, which switched to one-family NICU rooms in 2020 at the Women’s & Children’s Centre at Moses Cone Healthcare facility. By seeking for potential impacts of the layout transform, Cone Wellness is demonstrating its determination to selling wellness equity and lowering wellbeing disparities amid individuals. 

Teixeira-Poit’s research staff includes co-investigators Bonnie Fields, Ph.D., clinical associate professor in A&T’s School of Nursing, and Marjorie Jenkins, Ph.D., director of nursing investigate at Cone Overall health. The staff will perform a mixed-strategies review that triangulates patient wellbeing result details, client knowledge surveys and in-depth interviews with NICU staff.

The NIH review will establish on the team’s previous perform in a smaller pilot examine sponsored by a $7,500 Daisy Basis Overall health Equity Award. The Daisy-funded pilot examine included preliminary analyses of quantitative knowledge and interviews with nurses that highlighted spots for further more exploration.

The crew will simultaneously check out irrespective of whether disparities in health and fitness results and encounter of care exist across affected person sub-populations, with particular notice to race, ethnicity and socioeconomic status. The team also will gather and review qualitative data from clinicians and administrators to supply abundant element on processes that likely reproduce overall health disparities. Interviews will unearth obstacles and reveal strategies to mitigate unintended penalties of the NICU layout transform.

The new NIH funding is through the Assistance for Research Excellence (Sure) R16 method, which supports investigate ability building at establishments that enroll significant figures of learners from backgrounds nationally underrepresented in biomedical analysis.