Coached, Coordinated, Enhanced Neonatal Transition (CCENT)

Contact
Kayla Esser
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The team provided a project update at the 2022 CHILD-BRIGHT Virtual Symposium. View it here.

Better medical care has helped many women with challenging pregnancies deliver babies; however, some babies are born with serious and chronic conditions. Their families face a number of challenges when transitioning from the hospital to their homes. This project will evaluate a new type of care for these families. We will assign families a point person that focuses on three components of support: 1) care coordination, 2) parent education and empowerment, and 3) mindfulness using an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) framework. We will compare the experience, stress, and health of the families in the intervention arm with the experience, stress, and health of the families in the control arm.

Consult our Family Resource Binder Links

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Research theme:
BRIGHT Future: Projects that will redesign health care services to be more responsive to family needs

Age range:
Discharge from NICU–18 months later

Start date:
January 2017

Principal Investigators:
Dr. Julia Orkin, SickKids
Dr. Eyal Cohen, SickKids
Dr. Nathalie Major, CHEO
Dr. Paige Church, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre

2020-21 Project Update

A father's hand is touching the knee of a baby in an incubator — Read our 2020-21 update

2019-20 Project Update

CCENT is piloting a new way to support and empower families as they transition home with their baby from the neonatal intensive care unit. This year was a big one: we launched our study at all seven of our hospital sites and recruited 156 participants, or approximately 70% of our target of 225 participants. We completed the pilot and feasibility study at Sunnybrook and CHEO and are currently writing up the results.

We have started interviewing participants who received the intervention (at their child’s 12-month follow-up appointment), and they are telling us how much they appreciated their interactions with the nurse navigator. Nurse navigators provide support through: 1) parental coaching and psychosocial support within an Acceptance and Commitment Training (ACT) framework, 2) care coordination, and 3) education about caring for a medically complex infant.

Participants have expressed gratitude over the presence of the nurse navigator and the ACT sessions that were offered to them: “Those ACT sessions were the most helpful,” one parent indicated. “The strategy really helps (me) to step back and just take it a day at a time, and just focus on now, focus on what you have right now, and [...] get out of that real anxiety”.

As the majority of our study sites have switched to virtual recruitment due to COVID-19, we are continuing to offer our intervention to eligible participants.