Maternal and Child Health

Description

The Children’s Health Research group includes a multidisciplinary approach and aims to promote research in two areas in which it was really difficult to carry out research studies until a short time ago: the newborn and the infant who require being admitted to hospital.

The Maternal and Child Health Research group involves four strategic fields in which most of the projects can be included:

1. Research on human breast milk.
2. Early developmental care in preterm infants.
3. Follow-up of newborns with birth weight under 1500 g or gestational age below 32 weeks.
4. Patient safety including an educational point of view.

The main overall objectives of the different research areas are the following:

• General objective regarding research on human breast milk: To improve understanding of changes in human breast milk composition according to mother’s own breast milk and donor milk processing. To develop new processing methods in order to preserve human milk’s quality and to assess the impact on children’s health of the administration of human milk undergoing new processing techniques.
• General objective regarding the Developmental Care research area. To assess the impact of Developmental Care implementation on newborns, parents and healthcare professionals; particularly, to evaluate Family Integrated Care interventions on their infants’ clinical outcome.
• General objective regarding research on the follow-up care of infants under 1500 g. To describe the clinical outcomes of very preterm infants and to assess the impact of adjustments in implemented measures. Cooperation in the benchmarking process (e-newborn).
• Patient safety including an educational point of view. To evaluate the impact of real-time safety audits implementation in the neonatal unit. To identify new training instructive strategies for procedures required by neonatal intensive care patients.

The Research group has a major educational commitment and provides training in developmental care, patient safety, breast milk processing and many other issues, both in Spain and abroad. Training is performed both live attendance and online.