Variations and similarities in clinical management of neonatal abstinence syndrome: Findings of a Canadian survey
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: There are no evidence-based national guidelines for managing neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS) and surveys from other countries have demonstrated considerable variations in practice. OBJECTIVE: To describe NAS management practices in Canada. METHOD: The directors of all Level 2 and Level 3 neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) were contacted to request their participation in a structured telephone survey. Frequency distributions were generated and associations between practice variations and unit type (Level 2 or 3) and size were examined. RESULTS: Personnel at 65 of 103 sites (63.1%) participated. Most (92.3%) stated their hospital has a written NAS practice guideline. The majority (89.5%) use a version of Finnegan's scoring system to monitor signs. If pharmacological treatment is required, 89.2% admit infants to the NICU and 93.8% routinely use cardiorespiratory monitors when treatment is initiated. Morphine is the first-line medication at most sites (96.9%). There was greater variability in terms of other practices: 44.6% observe at-risk infants in the NICU, while 52.3% allow them to room-in with their mothers; 65.1% use adjunct medications; 36.9% and 38.9% will discharge infants on the first-line and adjunct medications respectively, and 53.8% reported that breastfeeding is always encouraged, while 44.6% discourage breastfeeding if the mother continues to use illicit drugs and 1.5% make recommendations on an individual basis. Few practice variations were associated with unit type or size. CONCLUSION: While most NICUs surveyed have an NAS practice guideline, there are some notable differences in how NAS is managed. This underscores the need for research that can be translated into best practices.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".