{"id":74208,"date":"2013-03-18T08:28:07","date_gmt":"2013-03-18T12:28:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=74208"},"modified":"2015-10-20T12:53:37","modified_gmt":"2015-10-20T16:53:37","slug":"neonatal-nursing-expert-jacqueline-mcgrath-joins-uconn-faculty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2013\/03\/neonatal-nursing-expert-jacqueline-mcgrath-joins-uconn-faculty\/","title":{"rendered":"Neonatal Nursing Expert Jacqueline McGrath Joins UConn Faculty"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Jacqueline<\/a>
Jacqueline McGrath, professor of nursing, has a joint appointment at the Connecticut Children’s Medical Center. (Peter Morenus\/UConn Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Jacqueline McGrath cares about the smallest human beings in a big way. McGrath, who has an international reputation for her expertise on developmental interventions with infants and their families, has a dual appointment as professor in UConn\u2019s School of Nursing and as director of nursing research at Connecticut Children\u2019s Medical Center. In both positions, she concentrates on the medical, emotional, and social issues surrounding the development of at-risk, pre-term babies.<\/p>\n

McGrath, who came to Storrs last July from Virginia Commonwealth University as part of UConn\u2019s Faculty 500 hiring program, earned her Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania.<\/p>\n

She developed an interest in health care from personal experience. The oldest of six children, she spent her childhood in Canton, OH. Her youngest sister was born with spina bifida, a birth defect in which the backbone and spinal canal do not close before birth. Children born with this condition require considerable long-term medical intervention for an optimal outcome, and McGrath was touched as she watched her parents deal with the vagaries of an often cumbersome health care system that failed to consider the impact of chronic care on the family as a whole.<\/p>\n

\u201cI earned my undergraduate degree in nursing from the University of Akron, and I decided pretty quickly that neonatal nursing was where I belonged,\u201d McGrath says. \u201cI knew I wanted to have an impact on babies\u2019 lives when they were so tiny and had so far to go.\u201d<\/p>\n

Subsequent graduate work, first at Kent State, where she earned her master\u2019s in nursing, and then at the University of Pennsylvania, helped focus her attention on the unmet needs of premature babies admitted to neonatal intensive care units (NICU\u2019s).<\/p>\n

\u201cOver the years,\u201d she says, \u201cwe have increased the survival rate of premature infants to something like 95 per cent, and these are infants born after only 25 or 26 weeks gestation. The medical advances that save these babies have been incredible, but I have been concerned about their quality of life after they\u2019re discharged. We\u2019re only beginning to understand brain development of these infants and the importance of neuroprotective intervention during the time they spend in the NICU before going home at between 36 and 40 weeks of post-menstrual age.\u201d<\/p>\n

NICU PLAYtime<\/b><\/p>\n

Because babies in a NICU generally have numerous medical procedures going on during their stay, and are often attached to a variety of monitors and other devices, the surroundings can be intimidating to new parents. With a busy staff paying necessary attention to specific medical procedures, the littlest patients may miss out on critical social interactions that foster attachment mechanisms that enable them to bond with their parents.<\/p>\n

McGrath has developed a special program known as PLAY, to promote bonding between parents and their premature infants.<\/p>\n

An acronym for P<\/b>arent-delivered, L<\/b>oving gentle massage, A<\/b>ge appropriate with Y<\/b>our cue-based assessment, PLAY teaches parents the best ways to touch and massage their premature infants. It encourages verbal and tactile interaction and begins a bonding process that generally occurs naturally with full-term babies but may not with preemies.<\/p>\n

\u201cThree months to an adult seems like no time at all,\u201d says McGrath, \u201cbut three months spent in a NICU seems like an eternity for a baby and its parents. This is why we need to give parents help in interacting with their babies; that\u2019s why I developed PLAY.\u201d<\/p>\n

In promoting parental involvement, PLAY also gives parents an opportunity to begin to understand the medical system. Given that some premature infants may have cognitive or physical issues that will require ongoing medical care for many years to come, parents learn to become their child\u2019s advocate as they navigate the unfamiliar world of doctors and hospitals.<\/p>\n

This structured approach to caregiving has proven beneficial to both the families involved and NICU doctors and nurses, who come to appreciate the active role parents can play in preparing premature infants to leave the hospital.<\/p>\n

Dual appointment offers opportunity<\/b><\/p>\n

The opportunity to teach and mentor students, while also expanding her research through UConn\u2019s collaboration with Connecticut Children\u2019s Medical Center, was irresistible to McGrath. She says adjusting to Connecticut\u2019s winter weather was the only negative associated with her move from Virginia.<\/p>\n

She is working with patients at both Connecticut Children\u2019s Medical Center in Hartford, and at the UConn Health Center in Farmington, and hopes to expand her work to St. Francis Hospital. \u201cI love the collaborative role I\u2019m in,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy work at CCMC also provides me the opportunity to foster the nursing staff in provision of evidence-based practice and nursing research,\u201d she says. \u201cThe enthusiasm surrounding research at Connecticut Children\u2019s is very exciting.\u201d<\/p>\n

McGrath equally enjoys her time teaching on campus. \u201cI love the environment and the chance to interact with students,\u201d she says. She is working with several nursing students in the Honors Program, helping them get started on their research programs, as well as several doctoral students in nursing, all with interests in mothers and babies.<\/p>\n

\u201cWorking with undergraduates while also working with doctoral students provides me the best of both worlds, and I often find ways for them to work together,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

\u201cUConn is so much more student-centered than anywhere else I\u2019ve taught,\u201d McGrath adds. \u201cThe University really values its students, and that makes it a great fit for me; it\u2019s who I am.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

McGrath has a joint appointment in the School of Nursing and as director of nursing research at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":74377,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1877,179,1],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[56],"class_list":["post-74208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nur","category-uconn-health","category-uncategorized"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-02 10:15:47","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74208"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74208\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":105325,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74208\/revisions\/105325"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/74377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74208"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=74208"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=74208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}