With advances in neonatal medicine, smaller and sicker infants are surviving premature birth. As these tiny patients battle for their lives, their parents also struggle with psychological consequences of an unexpected role.
The birth of a sick infants has long been documented as stressful events for the parents. High stress levels may alter parents´ interaction with their baby and impair their communication with health professionals, which can in turn affect parents´ participation in care planning and decision making.
Nursing interventions aimed at reducing the parental stress and anxiety levels during this crisis may have a positive impact on their ability to form an attatchment to their baby and make prudent decisions about his care. The planning of such interventions would be inhanced if the contributions of various factors to increased parental stress levels were identified.
Thi- descriptive study was conducted to understand the contents and degree of parental stress in the NICU during their premature´s hospitalization, and to give a baseline data in developing nursing intervention program.
Subjects were the 60 mother of hospitalized newborn in NICU of 2 University Hospital in Taejon City from April 1st, 1999 to June 30th, 1999, who agreed to take part in this study.
The instrument used in this study were Parental Stressor Scales:NICU(PSS:NICU) developed by Miles et al.. and validated by 3 NICU practitioners and 3 child health nursing faculties. The questionnaire has 4 dimensions and 45 items; sight and sounds of NICU(5 items), babies´ appearance and behavior nursing intervention(19 items), parental role .alteration and relationship with their baby(10 items), health team communication(11 items). The questionnaire asks parents to rate each item on a five-point Likert type scale that ranges from "not stressful" (1) to "extremely stressful"(5). Total scores representing overall stress from the NICU environment are calculated by summing response to each item. A high score indicates high stress. A subscale score is calculated by summing the responses to each item in the subscale. Cronbach´s a coefficients were .93.
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