(1041) Sustained Improvement in Kangaroo mother care leading to better breast feeding outcomes at a tertiary care out born neonatal Unit : A quality improvement Study.

Kangaroo mother care (KMC) is an evidence-based cost effective approach for reducing mortality and morbidity in preterm infants. India has the maximum number of preterm births in the world (1/5th of the total preterm). Despite the known evidence , coverage of KMC has remained quite low and even at the places where KMC is being practised the number of hours of KMC is lower than recommended by WHO. Average duration of KMC varies from 3-5 h/day in previous Indian studies . Our NICU caters a huge number of preterm babies and we observed that only a few mother were practicing KMC. The few mother’s practising KMC was also for very low duration ( 1-3 hours). Being an outborn centre, mother’s were not available most of the time and this was also the reason for insufficient mother’s milk for our preterm babies. The previous research and QI studies done on KMC are all inborn centres. Hence, we decided to do a Quality Improvement study to improve KMC coverage in our NICU.