Routine newborn care encompasses not only the evaluation and health maintenance of the infant, but also includes the counseling and education of parents or other caregivers. Anticipatory guidance is a key part of providing care to the healthy newborn. Educating parents about the care of their baby, especially new parents, is of the utmost importance. An appropriate intervention to provide this education is the implementation of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) health supervision clinical practice guideline (CPG). Furthermore, the implementation of the health supervision CPG via an office visit within the newborns first week of life allows the health care provider to evaluate the well-being of the infant and provide both anticipatory guidance and education on newborn care to the parents. Local services providing education and information on routine newborn care to parents was discontinued due to availability of the proper staff and financial instability. Following the discontinuation of these services, the local pediatric clinic received a 48% increase in the number of office phone calls from parents of newborn infants. The goal of this project was an effective implementation of a health supervision CPG based on the recommendation of the AAP. The objectives of this project were to ultimately increase the quality of health care provided to newborn infants in a private pediatric practice, as outlined in Healthy People 2010, and improve parental self-efficacy in providing newborn care with the utilization of Bandura’s self-efficacy theory. In turn, decreasing the number of phone calls received from the parents of newborns.
