Overland Park hospital highlights importance of ‘kangaroo care’ for premature babies

Jessica VanderKlei of Grain Valley was, in her own words, “freaking out.”

She was little more than halfway through her pregnancy on Jan. 18 when she noticed her feet had swollen. Her blood pressure spiked to a dangerous 188/120. Soon doctors were rushing her to Overland Park Regional Medical Center for an emergency Caesarean section.

“This baby is coming out now. Right now,” VanderKlei, 25, recalled the medical staff telling her just before her daughter, Reverie Smith, was plucked, tiny and wrinkly, from VanderKlei’s belly some 17 weeks early.

Weight: 1 pound, 1 once. Her feet measured barely twice the length of an adult thumbnail.

The child’s health was so imperiled that it was impossible for VanderKlei to hold her.

But that was some 135 days ago.

Now, two weeks into the hospital’s first Kangaroo Care-A-Thon — promoting continuous and long-term skin-to-skin contact between prematurely born infants and their parents — VanderKlei is hardly letting go. On a recent day, she nuzzled the plumper and far healthier Reverie, now 7 pounds, 12 ounces, on her chest in the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit.

“I feel like it’s just increased her ability to know me,” said VanderKlei, a first-time mom and a student in chiropractic medicine.

Kangaroo care does more than that, research has long shown.

The concept behind kangaroo care, also known as skin-to-skin care, is hardly new. It dates to the late 1970s, when pediatricians began to develop a greater appreciation for the health benefits to both pre-term and full-term infants of mother-child bonding, healing touch, holding and breast feeding.

The name “kangaroo care” was adopted in the 1980s when the bonding technique was likened to the way kangaroos nurture their babies in their pouches. Numerous research studies throughout the 1990s and 2000s have borne out its benefits.

In 2012, for example, evidence from 34 randomized studies involving more than 1,000 mother-baby pairs showed the babies who received skin-to-skin contact cried less; interacted with their mothers more; had better heart and lung stability and glucose levels; and tended to breast-feed longer.

The World Health Organization counts kangaroo mother care among the most effective strategies in combating illness and death among pre-term babies where conventional neonatal care is lacking. The care is promoted by the American Academy of Pediatrics as well as on websites including kangaroomothercare.com and kangacare.org.

Kangaroo care has in effect become a standard of care at most NICUs.

“There’s not a good reason not to be doing this,” said Courtney Eggers, a nurse and director at Overland Park Regional’s NICU, a unit that accommodates as many 71 premature infants, some born as early as 23 weeks into the normal 40-week pregnancy.

It was Eggers’ idea to begin the Kangaroo Care-A-Thon to raise awareness and to reinforce among parents, both mothers and fathers, that skin-to-skin contact with their babies is more than recommended, it’s required as part of treatment.

The goal, starting May 15, was for the mothers and fathers of the 40 or so premature infants on the unit to have skin-to-skin contact with the babies for a collective 1,000 hours. Already, they have logged more than 500 hours.

Stars taped to a window outside the NICU charted the top single-sitting hours for mothers and fathers. In some cases, for parents with very sick babies who couldn’t hold them for long, the time was 15 minutes. Others read one hour for the day, or two or five — or in one case, 11 hours combined by one child’s mother and father, who stripped off his shirt to hold his premature daughter.

Kierra Handley of St. Louis, a 27-year-old graduate student studying architecture at the University of Kansas, knew that odds were good the twins she was carrying might arrive as much as two weeks or even a month early.

But when her water broke April 16, two months before her due date, she ended up at Overland Park Regional, giving birth to babies weighing between 3 and 4 pounds and needing help to breathe.

Her son, Kyrie Griffin, was born at 9:07 p.m., followed at 9:08 by a girl who — like father, like daughter — bears his name, Kendall Griffin.

“I wanted to touch them and hold them, but I couldn’t,” Handley said. Two days passed before she had her first skin-to-skin contact.

By the time the Kangaroo Care-A-Thon commenced, she and the children’s dad were holding the babies up to four hours per day. The babies, she said, seemed calmer, less fussy, as soon as she held them.

“It’s pretty immediate,” said Eggers, the NICU nurse.

A chart on Jessica VanderKlei’s hospital room wall shows the progression of how long she and Reverie’s father, Adam Smith, had held their baby. On May 15, it was 90 minutes. A week later, on May 22, it was two hours. One day last week: five hours. Reverie is expected to remain in the hospital for at least another month.

Handley, meantime, stopped taking part in the Kangaroo Care-A-Thon late last week. The twins were deemed healthy. Now she’ll be holding them at home.

This story was originally published June 1, 2015 at 5:46 PM with the headline "Overland Park hospital highlights importance of ‘kangaroo care’ for premature babies."