As we have commented on more than one occasion, The Mother Kangaroo Method is the care for premature or low birth weight children keeping them in skin-to-skin contact with their mother. It is a simple and effective method that provides well-being for both babies and their mothers, starts in the hospital and can continue at home.
Under the titles "Kangaroo Care", "Kangaroo Care" or “Mother Kangaroo Program” Different interventions aimed primarily at the pre-term and / or low birth weight newborn have been grouped together.
The heterogeneity of these interventions is reflected in the diversity of the names with which they are identified: Kangaroo Care, Kangaroo Mother Care, Kangaroo Method, Kangaroo Mother Method, Kangaroo Mother Intervention, Kangaroo Technique, Kangaroo Program, Kangaroo Mother Program, skin contact with skin…
In particular the term "Skin to skin contact" or "skin-to-skin contact" has been frequently used in Anglo-Saxon scientific literature to describe interventions that use at least one of the main components of the Kangaroo Mother Method.
As we saw when talking about the origins of the Kangaroo Method, the Program began at the Maternal and Child Institute (IMI) of Bogotá, by Dr. Edgar Rey from 1978.
It was consolidated during the first five years under the coordination of the IMI pediatrics Héctor Martínez and Luis Navarrete and was known as the “Mother Kangaroo Program”. A group of researchers, who would later give rise to the Kangaroo Foundation (NGO led by health professionals, with the mission of humanizing neonatology through the application of the Mother Kangaroo Method), initiated the scientific evaluation of the Kangaroo Program of the IMI.
Why "Mother Kangaroo Program"?
The name "Kangaroo Mother Program" obeys specific meanings:
Program, because it is a set of actions whose main objective is to reduce the mortality of premature infants and compensate for the lack of incubators.
Mother refers to the child's mother being asked for her active participation in the care of prematurity.
Kangaroo, the term evokes the extrauterine maturation of the fetus as occurs in non-placental mammals, and refers to the mother, as provider of the so-called kangaroo position (defined below), continually loads the premature.
Definitely, the Mother Kangaroo Program it is the set of organized activities destined to carry out a specific health intervention, in this case the kangaroo mother intervention, with a team of health care personnel properly trained and organized, within a defined physical and administrative structure (generally, a hospital ).
But we have to keep defining, because the intervention (Kangaroo Mother Intervention) consists of a series of components that are applied in an organized and systematic way, following one method: the kangaroo mother method.
Closing the circle, back to the beginning, we define the Kangaroo Mother Method as a system of care for the premature and / or low birth weight child, standardized and protocolized based on skin-to-skin contact between the premature child and his mother.
Together with skin-to-skin contact, the components of a complete Kangaroo Method intervention are exclusive breastfeeding whenever possible and early departure in a kangaroo position, with strict ambulatory follow-up (instead of staying in neonatal care units, characterized by the logical hustle in them).
Definitely, the Mother Kangaroo Method seeks to empower the mother (parents or caregivers) and gradually transfer the ability and responsibility to be the primary caregiver of the baby, meeting their physical and emotional needs.
