NICU Questions and Answers
General Questions About the NICU Toolkit
What is the BFUSA “NICU Toolkit”?
BFUSA’s NICU Toolkit is a set of resources to help healthcare providers who work in the NICU to optimally support increased use of human milk and breastfeeding for premature and/or sick infants by incorporating Baby-Friendly principles into neonatal intensive care. The Toolkit includes the core NICU Resources document, which contains a tool for reviewing recommended practices and clinical guidance giving suggestions for implementing each practice. In addition, the Toolkit offers a series of instructional materials providing users with an orientation to these resources and how to use them.
Will there be a separate BFUSA NICU certification?
BFUSA does not plan to develop a separate NICU certification process or to expand Baby-Friendly certification into neonatal intensive care units beyond what is now included in BFUSA’s Guidelines and Evaluation Criteria (GEC). Instead, BFUSA is offering a free set of tools to help healthcare providers incorporate Baby-Friendly principles into the NICU.
How does incorporating Baby-Friendly principles into the NICU support equitable health care?
Infant prematurity and illness are experienced in approximately 10% of births in the United States. The resulting need for NICU care disproportionately impacts families already disadvantaged by social determinants of health and related disparities. Incorporating Baby-Friendly principles can decrease the additive negative impacts of prematurity or illness at birth due to these inequities.
Why are you asking for my contact information when I click on the “Access the NICU Toolkit” button?
We are asking for your contact information so that we can reach out to you in the future to get your feedback on the Toolkit, which we will use as part of our continuous improvement process. We will not share your contact information with anyone outside of BFUSA.
How can we access support, if we need it, when we start using the NICU Toolkit?
Questions Submitted by Users of the NICU Toolkit
We will populate this section with answers to the questions we receive from users of the NICU Toolkit. Please check back.