Neonatal individualized care in practice: a Swedish experience.

A family-centred, developmentally supportive approach to newborn intensive care referred to as NIDCAP (Newborn Individualized Developmental Care and Assessment Programme) has caught considerable interest during recent years. In this paper we review the scientific context behind its conceptual framework and summarize our experience from 10 years of training, implementation and research. We present the short- and long-term medical and developmental outcome of our Swedish NIDCAP studies as well as attitudes of nursing staff and neonatologists. Furthermore, ethical issues and scientific obstacles concerning this concept of care are discussed.