Thursday, January 22, 2009

Profiles in Education: University Hospital of New Mexico

The University Hospital of New Mexico has not only implemented a hospital based prevention program, but created a simple set of webpages that profiles their prevention program for new parents.

It's interesting to see that (1) they hope to expand it to all 52 NM hospitals and (2) they will be adding materials in Vietnamese and Navajho this year.

Tony Hillerman would be proud...
UNM Hospitals
Shaken Baby Syndrome: Prevention & Awareness Program
Our Program

The University Hospital has a parent educational program to prevent infant head trauma. This program duplicates the educational part of an educational/epidemiological study conduced by Dr. Mark Dias. From 1998 to 2004, Mark Dias, MD, FAAP and colleagues implemented a hospital-based parent educational program in upstate New York to teach new parents about the dangers of infant shaking. This study reduced the incidence of SBS by 47% in New York State.

Our Objectives

Our objectives of this educational program are to:

Establish an Abusive Head Trauma Prevention Program at University Hospital as a "standard of care.
Provide educational materials about SBS to the parents of newborn infants.
Assess parents' comprehension of the dangers of violent infant shaking at 7 months via telephone follow-up
Track effectiveness of the program through the collection of returned commitment statements (CS)
Evaluate the program's affect on the regional incidence of Shaken Baby Syndrome (SBS).
This study introduces the SBS prevention program to the University Hospital and will be administered to all parents of newborn infants prior to discharge from the hospital.

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