Skin-to-skin contact

Kangaroo care or kangaroo mother care (KMC), sometimes called skin-to-skin care, is a technique of newborn care where babies are kept skin-to-skin with a parent, typically their mother. It is most commonly used for low birth-weight preterm babies, who are more likely to suffer from hypothermia, while admitted to a neonatal unit to keep the baby warm and support early breastfeeding.

Kangaroo care, named for the similarity to how certain marsupials carry their young, was initially developed in the 1970s to care for preterm infants in countries where incubators were either unavailable or unreliable. There is evidence that it is effective in reducing both infant mortality and the risk of hospital-acquired infection, and increasing rates of breastfeeding and weight gain.

Skin-to-skin care is also used to describe the technique of placing full-term newborns very soon after birth on the bare chest of their mother or father. This also improves rates of breastfeeding and can lead to improved stability of the heart and breathing rate of the baby.

Kangaroo care seeks to provide restored closeness of the newborn with family members by placing the infant in direct skin-to-skin contact with one of them. This ensures physiological and psychological warmth and bonding. The parent's stable body temperature helps to regulate the neonate's temperature more smoothly than an incubator, and allows for readily accessible breastfeeding when the mother holds the baby this way.

While this model of infant care is substantially different from the typical Western neonatal intensive-care unit (NICU) procedures, the two are not mutually exclusive, and it is estimated that more than 200 neonatal intensive care units practice kangaroo care today. One recent survey found that 82 percent of neonatal intensive care units use kangaroo care in the United States today.

Kangaroo Care is likely the most widely used term in the United States for skin-to-skin contact. Gene Cranston Anderson may have been the first to coin the term Kangaroo Care in the USA. The defining feature of this is however for skin-to-skin contact, commonly abbreviated as SSC, also STS. This is used synonymously with "skin-to-skin care". Dr Nils Bergman, one of the founders of the Kangaroo Mother Care Movement, argues that since skin-to-skin contact is a place of care, not a kind of care in itself, skin-to-skin contact should be the preferred term.

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