P2.F114: The Unintentional Victim: What Barriers Exist in Accessing Support Services in the NICU

Background: While hospital systems are a 24/7 venture, most services supporting families are offered only during business hours. This disproportionately leaves out families who cannot visit their infants according to a typical weekday schedule. NICU infants may be hospitalized for months at a time, making consistent family involvement challenging. In addition, NICU parents suffer high levels of emotional distress, necessitating support. Due to lack of concordance between staffing hours and visitation, some families may not benefit to the same extent as others. The goal of the study is to investigate whether discrepancies exist for access to support services between different patient populations.

Methods: To determine what the standard work hours were for each of our family support services, we reached out to the following groups: social workers, psychologists, interpreters, lactation consultants, patient navigators, occupational therapists, physical therapists, and case managers. Typical patient-available hours were weekdays between 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM. Because families have multiple visitation events during their infant’s hospitalization, the percentage of visits for an individual family that occurred between 8:00AM to 5:00 PM (regular hours, RH) was calculated, as well as the percentage of visits outside of these times (outside regular hours, ORH). Information regarding socioeconomic status (SES) (represented by public versus private insurance), race, ethnicity, and language preference were collected. Data then will be analyzed to assess for relationships between these variables to determine whether there are statistically significant differences between visitation during routine support service hours based on SES, race, ethnicity, and language preference.

Results: Of the 381 patients in the analysis, the patient variables of race and ethnicity, SES, language spoken, and visit times were calculated as percentages (please refer to Figure a. for reference). Preliminary analysis with simple t-tests did indicate that non-White families were more likely to visit outside of traditional social support hours as compared to White families (p-value 0.026). Further analysis will be completed to determine if there are significant differences between visitation times based on demographic breakdown.

Conclusion: Our initial analyses suggest that disparities exist in access to family support services based on visitation times of non-White families in the NICU. Interventions such as funding support services during nontraditional visitation times could offer one practical way to battle such disparities and broaden necessary service outreach to reduce disadvantaged victims of the system.