Substance Exposed Newborns: Identification, Referral & Treatment

In this webcast, sponsored by the National Abandoned Infants Assistance Resource Center (NAIARC) [ aia.berkeley.edu ], representatives from each of 4 federally funded demonstration projects share their experiences developing policies and procedures to meet the federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) mandates related to substance exposed newborns (SEN). The projects include A Helping Hand in Boston, MA; Healthy Connections in Toledo, OH; C-SIMI Baby Steps Project in Denver, CO; and the FEAT Project in Eugene, OR. The presenters discuss challenges they encountered in multidisciplinary collaboration, and strategies they employed to overcome those challenges. They also share policies and procedures developed to identify pregnant substance users and SEN, and they present strategies the projects use to engage pregnant substance users and develop plans of safe care for SEN. Although the projects are each housed in a different type of agency—private hospital, state public health agency, local child welfare agency, and university based early intervention program—they all developed collaborative workgroups with similar representation, and they all employed specialized staff to engage families in services. The specialized staff ranged from paraprofessional peer workers to master level case workers. The webcast offers recommendations based on lessons learned from these projects, as well as additional resources located on the NAIARC website.