Implications for Brain Development, Nursery Care and the Essential Role of the Family

This webinar was presented live on March 5, 2021 at 4PM US Eastern Time. A recording of the presentation and supplementary handout of the slide deck can be found here.

Webinar Presented by Heidelise Als

Dr. Heidelise Als is a researcher and clinician, who is concerned with the neurodevelopment of full-term, high-risk and preterm newborns, their parents’ essential role in their earliest lives outside the womb as well as the effects of the environment and of professionals’ care in intensive medical care settings for such newborns. Her goal is to improve the future for all newborns and especially those born early and/or with special challenges requiring intensive medical care, and for their families.

Dr. Als is the originator of the Newborn Individualized Developmental Care and Assessment Program (NIDCAP), and the director of the first NICU-based training program in this approach, The National NIDCAP Training Center. She is also the originator of the Assessment of Preterm Infants’ Behavior (APIB), published in 1982, based on and in expansion of the Brazelton Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale (1973).

In 2001 she founded the NIDCAP Federation International (NFI), a charitable organization with the mission to assure NIDCAP care for all newborns and families world-wide. Her own and others’ research has documented significant improvement in the health and neurodevelopmental outcomes of preterm infants as well as greater parent confidence and competence for those, who received NIDCAP care as compared conventional, task and schedule oriented care. Her work has changed the training and education of staff as well as the design of and care delivered in NICUs in the US and elsewhere.