This K23 Career Development award will provide necessary training, mentoring, and research experience for Dr. Weber to become an independent nurse scientist focused on patient-oriented research in family management of infant chronic conditions. Increasing numbers of very preterm infants are surviving and have chronic, complex healthcare needs due to prematurity. These infants experience increased healthcare utilization, long durations of stay in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), and are at high risk of developing prematurity-related complications. As a result, their care is complex, and families need structured training to effectively understand, monitor, and manage their infant's care. Dr. Weber's innovative, video-based intervention applies evidence-based family management theories to better equip parents to meet the chronic, complex healthcare needs of their preterm infant. The research component of this award aims to 1) refine a novel family management program, called PREEMIE PROGRESS, through iterative usability and acceptability testing and 2) test feasibility and acceptability of the refined intervention and study procedures in a pilot randomized controlled trial. Dr. Weber will use implementation science tools and approaches to refine the intervention and study procedures to ensure that PREEMIE PROGRESS addresses key program elements that will be important for future adoption and implementation in NICU settings. She anticipates that the intervention will decrease parent anxiety and depression, increase infant weight gain and receipt of mother's milk, and reduce neonatal healthcare utilization. Dr. Weber's long-term career goal is to become an international leader in designing, disseminating, and implementing sustainable family management programs to improve parent-infant health outcomes in the NICU. Dr. Weber's short-term career goal is to develop, test, and translate into NICU practice an efficacious family management intervention for parents of preterm infants. To execute the proposed research and obtain preliminary data required to support future efficacy testing in a larger pragmatic trial (R01), Dr. Weber needs training in implementation/ improvement science, qualitative methods, conduct of pragmatic trials, and leadership management skills. Dr. Weber will significantly advance nursing science through this award by obtaining preliminary feasibility and acceptability data for a scalable and sustainable intervention to facilitate family management and improve parent-infant health outcomes. University of Cincinnati is a rich institutional environment that provides a wealth of resources to support Dr. Weber's research and training plans, including the expertise of NIH funded mentors with significant experience in the implementation (Dr. Kaplan) and family management (Dr. Bakas) sciences. Dr. Weber also draws on the institution's cadre of collaborations through an interdisciplinary advisory team, who will provide consultation in health outcomes research (Dr. Tubbs Cooley), family-centered care (Dr. Voos), clinical trials with preterm infants (Dr. Parikh), technology-enhanced learning and mHealth (Dr. Rota), and biostatistics (Dr. Ying).
The purpose of this study is to refine and pilot test a mobile health (mHealth), video-based family management program for parents of preterm infants hospitalized in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). By moving beyond the basic infant care tasks taught by parenting programs and instead comprehensively training parents to use evidence-based family management skills, we hypothesize that our intervention, called PREEMIE PROGRESS, will better equip parents to meet the chronic, complex healthcare needs of their preterm infant.
