Abstract
Each year many families are affected by the loss of a child. Some families may be aware that their baby’s life will be short-lived and yet other families are left to deal with difficult decisions immediately after their child’s birth. In addition to the stress of a baby dying, many families feel overwhelmed by the environment of the Newborn Intensive Care unit (NICU) due to the machines, the sterility of the environment, and unfamiliar faces. In the NICU at Nebraska Medicine in Omaha, Nebraska, there is currently no protocol to guide the bedside nurse and APRN on care of the dying baby and family support. At this point in a family’s life, it is important that their decisions be supported and their wishes for their dying baby be honored. To strengthen the bedside nurse’s knowledge base and improve their ability to provide family-centered care, nursing education was provided. To determine what type of education was needed, the APRN and the NICU nurses at Nebraska Medicine completed a survey on their attitudes toward palliative care. Following completion of this instrument, the nurses were given an educational in-service on palliative care. In addition to an educational offering, a palliative care protocol was developed to guide those caring for the dying baby at the bedside. A protocol, policy, guideline, and order set were implemented in the fall of 2018 at the Nebraska Medicine’s NICU.