Type of Submission
Poster
Keywords
NAS, addiction, neonatal, infants, policy, Finnegan Neonatal Abstinence Scoring Tool
Proposal
Destiny is having the worst week of her life. She’s either too hot or too cold. She can't shake a fever. Her muscles are twitching and her skin is crawling. Not to mention all the GI issues; to top it off she can’t sleep. To make matters worse Destiny knows someone who can relieve her pain, instead they push her to the side leaving her to scream in anguish. Destiny is addicted to opioids. Destiny is 2 days old. She was born in the hospital to a mother who was addicted, and therefore, she was born addicted. She is undergoing current best-practice treatment for neonatal abstinence syndrome, or NAS. The CDC defines NAS as a “withdrawal syndrome that can occur in newborns exposed to certain substances, including opioids, during pregnancy”. As we see in Destiny’s case, current policies for infants suffering from NAS do not offer medical intervention, but rather, it forces the child to suffer through the painful symptoms of withdrawal. This paper will review the problems, causes, and solutions to current NAS care treatment policies.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Publication Date
2024
Current Best Practice Treatment for NAS
Destiny is having the worst week of her life. She’s either too hot or too cold. She can't shake a fever. Her muscles are twitching and her skin is crawling. Not to mention all the GI issues; to top it off she can’t sleep. To make matters worse Destiny knows someone who can relieve her pain, instead they push her to the side leaving her to scream in anguish. Destiny is addicted to opioids. Destiny is 2 days old. She was born in the hospital to a mother who was addicted, and therefore, she was born addicted. She is undergoing current best-practice treatment for neonatal abstinence syndrome, or NAS. The CDC defines NAS as a “withdrawal syndrome that can occur in newborns exposed to certain substances, including opioids, during pregnancy”. As we see in Destiny’s case, current policies for infants suffering from NAS do not offer medical intervention, but rather, it forces the child to suffer through the painful symptoms of withdrawal. This paper will review the problems, causes, and solutions to current NAS care treatment policies.
