Maternal mental health and newborn intensive care units: regional experiences in Argentina

Abstract

Abstract: The care of high-risk newborns has achieved remarkable progress in the last decades. However, care and attention to their parents’ physical and emotional state were not considered for a long time. Mothers and fathers of high-risk newborns go through a “double crisis”: The expected evolutionary crisis that a birth implies and the unexpected vital crisis of separation caused by the admission of the neonate with a high biological risk to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). This situation of high vulnerability (biological, psychological, and familial) requires a careful look at the parental perinatal mental health, particularly regarding the development of affective disorders, especially in the mother. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO, 2023), the rate of premature births ranged internationally between 4% and 16% of the children born in 2020. In Argentina, in 2019, of 625,441 live births, 55,709 were born before 37 weeks, representing a prematurity rate of 8.9%. Over the last decade, an increase in the prematurity rate of more than 10% has been observed (Ministerio de Salud Argentina, 2021a). In addition to prematurity, there are other medical conditions (diagnosed prenatally or at birth) of the newborn that require hospitalization, for example, genetic syndromes, heart diseases, surgical and neurological pathologies, and social reasons.