Full oral feeding delay prevention in preterm newborns : The benefits of developmental care.

This data set was collected during a pilot monocentric observational study. This study was led in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) where a professional routine practice of feeding impairment prevention changed in 2019. The aim of this professional preventive practice change was to harmonize care practices in the NICU in order to better comply with the philosophy of developmental care. This data set gathers data on oral feeding development markers during the transition from tube to full oral feeding and demographic characteristics of preterm newborns without co-morbidities. It also specifies several biomedical vulnerabilities accumulated by the preterm newborns. It offers novel markers of nursing outcomes in taking into account cumulative individual biomedical vulnerabilities, which is of great interest when studying the fate of children born prematurely, whose characteristics vary greatly from one individual to another. More specifically, the objective of the pilot study was to assess the benefits of the preventive care on full oral feeding delay in preterm newborns. To do so, oral feeding development was assessed in different groups of preterm newborns, as a function of the preventive care given. Three groups were set up and followed-up, since 3 different types of preventive care were offered in the NICU from 2014 to 2022. The former group, shown in the first data set, concerned premature newborns born from 2014 to 2018 who received orofacial stimulations in a standardized protocol way (SOFS) that nevertheless conformed to cue-based feeding. The 2 latter groups, shown in the second data set, concerned premature newborns born from 2019 to 2022, who enjoyed the benefits of developmental care philosophy that the NICU's team has chosen to implement, in order to limit full oral feeding achievement delay. The individualized parental support program based on responsive feeding care, named PARENTALIM, was proposed to the parents of preterm newborn with few biomedical vulnerabilities. It encouraged parents to take part in promoting the transition from tube to full oral feeding and thus gives them a share of responsibility in the care given to their preterm newborn before hospital discharge. To optimize furthermore the preventive care for very preterm newborns, the neonatal individualized developmental care and assessment program (NIDCAP) was strengthened with PARENTALIM, what was referred to as NIDCAP+PARENTALIM practice in the data set. Indeed, NIDCAP is reserved to very preterm born newborns in NICU’s today. It would have been unethical not to maintain NIDCAP for these more vulnerable newborns, just as it would have been inconceivable to require the care team to apply NIDCAP to all premature newborns admitted to the department.