NCT04850794

Evaluation of an Interdisciplinary Decision Guide for Infant Feeding Assessment

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 56 (actual)
• Sponsor: University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Accepted

Summary

Preterm infants are at risk for feeding problems which can persist through early childhood. These feeding problems may include oral motor, sensory, digestive, nutritional, respiratory, and/or behavioral components. In North Carolina's early intervention program, speech pathologists or occupational therapists are responsible for completing feeding evaluations, and may not know when to refer infants out to medical specialists to address these other domains. This study will test a decision support tool in hypothetical feeding evaluation scenarios. The hypothetical scenarios will consist of real feeding videos of preterm infants who recently participated in a multidisciplinary feeding evaluation. Parent-reported outcomes of the infant's real evaluation will be compared to those of the speech pathologists and occupational therapists in our study who do, and do not, use the decision support tool. The investigators hypothesize that therapists with the tool will make recommendations that are closer to those of the multidisciplinary team, and that they will find the tool useful and easy to use. Due to recruitment limitations with families, the study was adapted in October, 2021 prior to enrollment of subjects to use case studies, rather than infant videos, as the hypothetical situation from which to test the tool. Therapists will then answer clinical questions without using the tool when viewing the first case study, and will use the tool to answer questions when viewing the second case study. Order of case study presentation will be randomized among participants.

Conditions

• Premature Birth
• Feeding and Eating Disorders of Childhood

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	Decision Support Tool	The decision support tool is an observational checklist with recommendations for specific specialist referrals based on what the provider observed during the feeding evaluation.

Timeline

• Start date: 2021-07-14
• Primary completion: 2022-02-07
• Completion: 2022-02-08
• First posted: 2021-04-20
• Last updated: 2023-03-21
• Results posted: 2023-03-21

Locations

1 site across 1 country: United States