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1. Background
Although technological advances have resulted in the survival of a higher number of premature infants, complications are still high and huge financial and emotional burdens continue to weigh heavily on the shoulders of families and the health care systems (1). Premature birth has some psycho-social consequences as it leads to “premature parenting” in which the expectations of the mother for “normal” pregnancy and giving birth to a healthy baby are not met. Pregnancy duration allows for emotional adjustment with the changes of pregnancy and preparation for parenting (2). Parents of premature infants (PPI) are deprived of this adjustment opportunity and often experience a high emotional stress during the infant’s residence in NICU. They also experience high levels of depression and anxiety and change in parenting patterns until these children go to elementary and preschool.
Interventions to enhance parents’ adaptation to premature infants have not developed along with the rapid development of technology for the survival of these babies. Among different interventions which have been tested on parents, most of them begin at the time of discharge or shortly after that; when the negative consequences of parents’ mental health has changed parents’ understanding of their baby and inefficient patterns of parent-infant interactions are formed (3).
Items such as recognizing the critical stages of parents’ life with premature infants during the course of care, parents’ needs, and emotional impact of this event on parents and individual differences of parents in response to this event are among the recommendations for family-centered care (4). Despite emphasis on family-centered care, its implementation is challenging. While, there are many references on parental experiences, there is no powerful synthesis of these evidences to direct the development of future services and influence the development of parent-centered services; therefore, this study aimed at developing a support system for PPI, based on family-centered care and scientific evidences.
2. Methods
In order to develop a support system for PPI, four key steps were conducted which include: explaining parents’ needs, systematic review of literature to identify effective interventions in supporting parents of premature infants, designing a model of supporting PPI to take care of their babies and evaluating the designed system. In this section, we describe the methodology of each step (Figure 1).
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