Dr. Jacqueline McGrath is a Professor and Vice Dean for Faculty Excellence at the UTH San Antonio, School of Nursing. Research foci include integration of family-centered and developmentally supportive caregiving with premature infants and their families in the NICU. More specifically, her work has focused on the biobehavioral outcomes of increasing parent engagement on both parents and the infant. Increasing parent engagement is believed to be a mechanism for increasing parent self-management skills after infant discharge and ultimately enhancing infant long-term development. She has also conducted studies related to preterm infants’ oral feeding readiness and preterm infant touch and massage (parent provided). Based on her research, she developed the NICU-PLAY program for parents and their hospitalized preterm infants. She has published more than 150 peer-reviewed articles. Dr. McGrath is the Co-Editor for Advances in Neonatal Care the journal of the National Association of Neonatal Nurses. In 2007, Dr. McGrath became a fellow in the American Academy of Nursing. She received her BSN from the University of Akron; MSN from Kent State University in parent-child nursing; both a post-master’s certificate as a Neonatal Nurse Practitioner and a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.
Parents are essential to infant brain development; high risk birth with admission to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) only increases their vital role. Current evidence increasingly provides direction for how best to fully engage parents through increased opportunities for both physical and emotional closeness enhancing parent-infant interactions and participation in NICU caregiving activities. Early brain development is highly affected by early experiences particularly those with parents. Parent engagement is defined as a dynamic process focused on enhancing and supporting the parent-infant experience; specifically enhancing the acquisition of skills for problem-solving and provision of appropriate infant care based on the unique infant needs. Enhancing parent engagement is one means of decreasing what has been recently documented as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) often experienced by parents who must traverse the chaotic NICU environment while supporting their high-risk infant. Concurrently, the unique needs of the infant’s developing brain demands that caregiving by parent and health providers be neuroprotective matching the “expectations” for experiences that “nurture” their development.
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