A National Survey on Oral Feeding Management Practices Across Canadian Neonatal Intensive Care Units
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Aim To explore oral feeding management practices, specifically initiation and advancement of oral feeds, across level II and III neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) in Canada.Methods A national online survey was conducted across 65 NICUs (34 level II, 31 level III), which included questions on hospital demographics and clinical approaches for initiating, advancing, and managing oral feeds. A descriptive analysis was performed on the responses.Results Of the 65 NICUs surveyed, 74% (n = 48) completed the survey. Many reported using custom-developed NICU guidelines for initiating and advancing oral feeds (n = 22, 46%), while few used evidence-based protocols (n = 16, 33%) or standardized assessments (n = 1, 2%). The most common clinical factors considered for initiating and advancing oral feeds include, behavioral cues (n = 47, 98%), stable vital signs (n = 47, 98%), gestational age (n = 43, 90%), and suck-swallow-breathe coordination (n = 26, 54%). Most units utilized a multidisciplinary approach (n = 38, 79%) with family involvement (n = 38, 79%). Feeding issues were typically addressed only during hospitalization, with no post-discharge follow-up (n = 31, 65%).Conclusion This study revealed significant variation in oral feeding management practices across Canadian level II and III NICUs and highlights a shift toward evidence-based clinical factors for oral feeding initiation and advancement. These findings highlight the need for standardized, evidence-based guidelines to ensure consistent and optimal care in NICUs.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".