Newborn Assessment in Mother-Baby Units: A Comprehensive Nursing Care Approach

The primary role of RNs in a mother-baby unit is to ensure that they provide the best nursing care to the mothers and their infants after delivery. Also, RNs are responsible for monitoring mother and newborn bonding and recording adverse reactions to medications and other vital signs (Poggenborg et al., 2015). Developing a comprehensive teaching plan is vital in offering training, and orienting a new graduate nurse into the unit is important to ensure that a perfect environment is created for the mother and newborn to receive the best care plan.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Order now

A new graduate nurse will be trained on how to assess a newborn’s mouth by highlighting areas to be observed. Notably, this is done through observation of the mouth size, position, movement, and shape of the newborn’s tongue (Bryant, 2017). Under normal instances, the mouth of the baby should manage saliva, and the lips should be pink and symmetrical (Poggenborg et al., 2015). The neck of the newborn is assessed by looking at the bones across the clavicles (upper chest). A normal neck is observed through the demonstration of unimpeded mobility of the neck tissues. The normal chest is depicted by the existence of symmetrical nipples, and bilateral synchronous chest movement. Also, it should have a normal heart rate and breath sounds.

Assessment of the baby’s arms, legs, and feet is critical to establishing whether the newborn has perfect movement (Bryant, 2017). Based on skin assessment, train the new nurse to understand that the entire body of the newborn, scalp, and skin must always be inspected and palpated to determine the changes, including the masses that may not be visible. Notably, the head of the newborn is usually assessed by inspecting and palpating it to determine its shape, size, and symmetry. More imperatively, the new nurse needs to understand that a newborn’s eye is often assessed through the use of an ophthalmoscope and the ear of the newborn is also assessed through thorough inspection and palpation. The new nurse needs to understand that the assessment of the nose is performed using inspection. During the assessment, the examination will ensure that the nose remains symmetric and is in the middle position.

References

Bryant, S. G. (2017). Keeping it in the program: Second year nursing students as stand-in patients for first year head-to-toe assessment check-offs. Nurse Educator, 42(2), 60-61. https://journals.lww.com/nurseeducatoronline/Citation/2017/03000

Poggenborg, R. P., Pedersen, S. J., Eshed, I., Sørensen, I. J., Møller, J. M., Madsen, O. R., ... & Østergaard, M. (2015). Head-to-toe whole-body MRI in psoriatic arthritis, axial spondyloarthritis and healthy subjects: first steps towards global inflammation and damage scores of peripheral and axial joints. Rheumatology, 54(6), 1039-1049. https://academic.oup.com/rheumatology/article/54/6/1039/1799654