How to go home early from hospital with my newborn baby?

Do you want a baby to be discharged home ASAP if you are the parents of the baby, the medical staff, or the manager of the hospital?

If yes, then HOW?

Possible answers to this question may be provided by our international research team including Ryo Itoshima, Venla Ojasalo, and Liisa Lehtonen at the University of Turku.

Long hospital stay in NICUs

NICUs (neonatal intensive care units) provide treatment and care for sick newborn babies in hospital.

Such babies sometimes need long hospital stays, which may separate the babies from their parents, increase the workloads of medical staff, and lead to higher hospital costs.

Among high-resource countries, the length of hospital stays for premature babies was longest in Japan and shortest in Finland.

Why are hospital stays long in Japan?

Our study compared babies’ length of hospital stays in Japan and Finland.

The length of hospital stays was longer in Japan than in Finland by 3 weeks.

(Itoshima R., et al. Early Hum Dev. 2024)

The figure shows how much each reason contributed to the hospital stays of each baby.

On average, babies in Japan need longer hospital stays of 8 days due to a lack of parents’ readiness (orange area) and 9 days due to feeding problems (green area) compared to Finland.

How could we reduce the length of hospital stays?

Based on our study, babies in Japan could go home 8 days earlier if parents got ready for discharge sooner and 9 days earlier if parents could feed their baby from a feeding tube at home.

How effective is the strategy above for medical expenses?

If a NICU in Japan, for example, had 300 admissions per year and 25% were premature babies, 1275 admission days or 3.5 patients per day would be reduced.

Don’t you think everyone will be happy if the babies can stay close to their parents sooner, the nurses have less work, and the hospital needs less money?

Itoshima R, Ojasalo V, Lehtonen L. Impact of discharge criteria on the length of stay in preterm infants: A retrospective study in Japan and Finland. Early Hum Dev. 2024;193:106016.

Ryo Itoshima
The writer is a PhD student at the University of Turku. He majors in neonatology, pediatrics and has a clinical background as a neonatologist.