Doreen Crawford is a neonatal nurse and senior lecturer in nursing and midwifery at De Montfort University in Leicester. She focuses on care for newborn babies born premature or sick.
‘Some babies arrive at about 23 weeks of gestation – just half a pregnancy. They cannot breathe independently, tolerate feed, or keep themselves warm – about 80 per cent will die. Of those that survive, the majority have some sort of impairment, which could be minor, such as a learning difficulty.
‘For these reasons, neonatal nursing is seriously hard work. You’d think it was all cuddling and feeding, but the role is technologically advanced. We manage a lot of machinery, such as respiratory support. It also involves many calculations as the babies have very small circulation – less blood in volume than the amount of coke it takes to fill a can. With drips you must not overload the baby with fluid. When administering drugs, even a gram of paracetamol is too much for a tiny baby, so we work in decimals and fractions.
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