Neonatal Nursing

There are many books on the care of the sick infant and some are excellent. Most, however, are written with medicine in mind. This book is written mainly by experienced neonatal nurses, although some chapters have been written by the appropriate specialists. lt is intended primarily for nurses who Iook after sick infants and is not intended to be an exhaustive reference but to address some of the issues and concepts of neonatal care in the 1990s. Nursing models are an important part of neonatal care in the 1990s but this book has not been written within this framework. There are several reasons for this: arguably no current model is ideally suited to neonates and the favouring of one particular model might restriet the book’s applicability. Also, as contributors from other disciplines were invited to contribute we were anxious that these chapters did not stand out as oddities. Additionally, much neonatal care overlaps and were a framework to be used in its entirety for each nursing care chapter we feit that there could be some repeti tion; conversely, if a framework was fragmented in some chap ters to cover specific areas of care, we were concemed that the overall effect would have been ‘bitty’. We feit that such treat ment of nursing models would have been unjustifiable. In this book, the terms ‘infant’ and ‘baby’ are used inter changeably and where the term ‘he’ is used, the term ‘she’ is equally appropriate.