Post-NICU interventions delivered in the community to support parents of premature infants’ mental health and parent-infant interactions: A scoping review protocol

Objective: The objective of this scoping review is to understand the extent and type of evidence in relation to interventions that support parents of premature infants’ mental health and parent-infant interaction quality in the community after discharge home from the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). Introduction: Parents of preterm infants experience increased postpartum mood and anxiety disorders (PMAD) compared to parents of term infants. PMAD places infants at risk of poor parent-infant interactions, which compounds the stress they experience from their medical fragility and the NICU environment. This leads to poor health and developmental outcomes. However, interventions that support parents’ mental health and improve parent-infant interactions can effectively buffer infants from this stress, thereby improving their health and developmental outcomes. Inclusion criteria: Participants will include mothers and fathers of infants born prematurely. Prematurity is defined as an infant born before 37 weeks of gestation. The concept of interest is interventions aimed at supporting parents' mental health and improving parent-infant interactions. The context is the community setting, after infants are discharged home from the NICU. Methods: This review will follow the JBI methodology for scoping reviews. MEDLINE (Ovid), Embase (Ovid), CINHAL (EBSCOhost), and PsycINFO (EBSCOhost) databases will be searched with no time limits. Titles and abstracts, then full-text research articles published in English will be screened by two independent reviewers against eligibility criteria. Data will be extracted into a data extraction table. The data from included studies will be presented in tabular form, accompanied by a narrative summary.