Introduction

A plethora of excellent books, both long and short, now exist describing the physical management of healthy infants, and the diagnosis and treatment of the many severe illnesses to which the low birthweight infant, in particular, is heir. But, as this aspect of care has become more and more sophisticated - and successful - we believe that more attention now needs to be given to providing for the emotional and physical needs of the parents whose newborn baby is a patient in a neonatal unit, and also to helping them to be with and be involved in the care of their sick baby. The eleven chapters in this section are an attempt to provide the ground rules for this vitally important area of neonatal care. We start with three chapters which aim to set the scene for the shorter and more practical chapters which follow. First we discuss how to keep babies out of neonatal units, since we believe that the most efficient way of coping with the topic of this book is prevention of neonatal unit admission. If at all possible, babies should be with their mothers on a postnatal ward or at home. There is then a review, written by Marshall Klaus and John Kennell - who in their seminal paper over one decade agol first highlighted the problems of mother-infant separation in the neonatal period - of some of the many studies which have been done in an attempt to improve the care of parents in neonatal units. Thirdly, we have outlined the needs of the parents of babies on a neonatal unit as they have emerged in a series of studies carried out during the past few years.