We are pleased to announce that the Intervention for Neurodevelopmental Support in Preterm Infants using Responsive parenting and E-health or ‘INSPIRE’ study has received a grant of 3,7 million SEK from the Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare (FORTE) for 2024-2026.
INSPIRE is a new, e-health initiative aimed at parents of very premature babies, after discharge from the hospital. The INSPIRE intervention aims to support the interaction between parents and children with the aim of improving children’s development and well-being of the family. The research group is a multi-professional team that includes paediatricians, neonatologists, speech and language therapists, physiotherapists and psychologists.
A pilot to evaluate the feasibility of the program aims to recruit 20 families and is already well underway and is being led by Malin Bergman Papworth (speech and language therapist) and Jenny Norlander (psychologist).
The grant allows us to plan the start of the randomized clinical trial (RCT) in 2024.
The INSPIRE randomized clinical trial will include 176 families with very preterm infants upon discharge from Umeå University hospital and satellite hospitals in northern Sweden. In the clinical trial, half of the infants will be randomized to follow the INSPIRE program. The intervention group will receive one intervention session during hospital stay and 16 sessions upon discharge using an e-health platform. Sessions will include the parents recording a specified interaction with the child, and then watching the video together with the interventionist while getting constructive feedback on how the parental response and the environment can be adjusted to the child’s emotional and developmental needs.
The outcomes of interest are cognitive-, motor-, language-, and feeding development, parent-child interaction, the parents’ mental health as well as parental stress and parental reflective functioning.
This is an exciting new, e-health project which aims to improve the health and wellbeing of very preterm infants and their families in the northern half of Sweden said Prof Magnus Domellöf, principal investigator of the INSPIRE study.
