Developmental Intervention for Hospitalized Newborns With Congenital Heart Disease

The intervention of Individualized Developmental Care (IDC) is designed to minimize the mismatch between the fragile infant brain's expectations and the experiences of stress and pain inherent in the hospital environment. An ICU that provides individualized, developmentally-supportive care includes a soothing environment, supports parents as their child's primary caregiver, providing continual adjustment of caregiving in support of the child's wellbeing by reading the infant's cues and providing interventions to calmness throughout caregiving, capitalizing on the infant's strengths, and providing supports toward healing, growth and learning. NIDCAP is the experimental intervention to be tested in the current study. NIDCAP is the only evidence-based, comprehensive, internationally recognized program of IDC.