Area III: E-Health in neonatal care

Most prematurely born children grow up to be healthy, but as a group, they are at a greater risk of developing cognitive, emotional and behavioural problems. Every year 7% of all children are born prematurely (gestational age of less than 37 weeks) and the numbers of preterm births are rising in Sweden as well as internationally. Preterm births often involve long hospitalisations for children and parents, and discharge from hospital often means a difficult transition for parents in both short and long-term perspectives.Traditionally, communication with parents following discharge has been through home visits or telephone calls. By communicating through digital technology, it may be possible to improve the support to parents and thereby make the transition from hospital to home less stressful.

This is what the parents think:

"It is positive that tablet computer was easy to use and that you could put in the weight values and then also follow the weight development and use the chat to chat with home health care."

"We were on leave for two more weeks before we were discharged and during that time, we could have used the tablet instead of going in."

The next phase is the evaluation phase where the parents are asked to participate in evaluating the tablet computer. Parents receive a tablet computer when returning home to stay at home while they are enrolled in neonatal care. This gives parents the opportunity to communicate with the staff about the child's health by means of pictures, videos and chat through a secure and encrypted connection. The tablet computer does not replace the visits or telephone contact with the the neonatal home health care, but it is a supplement. The tablet computer means that parents can quickly get in touch with the staff of the neonatal care partly through chat function, send video films, pictures. It is possible to monitor the child such as following the weight. The research project will be evaluated via questionnaires to parents, staff and interviews of parents and staff during 2020-2021.
The questionnaires include the child's health, parents' experiences of being cared for at home and questionnaires from a cost perspective.