Feeding as Co-occupation in the NICU Setting

Course overview

Occupational therapy practice is rooted in supporting a person's participation in valued activities of daily life. Accordingly, our expertise in this area lends itself to the facilitation of meaningful and skillful feeding and eating experiences across the lifespan. Within the NICU context and environment, feeding is much more than the infant's nutritional intake or development of oral motor skill. Feeding is richly and uniquely contexted; there are temporal features, spatial considerations, sociocultural conditions, and shared aspects of the experience. The purpose of this course is to examine the shared, interactive aspects of infant-caregiver feeding. A discussion of the occupational science concept co-occupation is presented and applied to NICU practice. Neonatal occupational therapists will be challenged to view feeding through a co-occupation "lens" and consider how this lens affects feeding at infant, caregiver, and community levels.