Therapy Services Offered at the St. Louis Children’s Hospital NICU
If your baby is admitted to the newborn intensive care unit (NICU) at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, they may be seen by one or more of our therapy service NICU specialists. Therapy in the NICU provides essential support to babies, promoting their overall well-being during a critical time in their growth. Learn more below about how therapists can help your baby.
- Physical therapists address an infant’s active and passive range of motion, developmental progression, movement patterns, lower extremity development, trunk stability, positioning and management of tone, and work on weight-bearing activities for upper and lower extremities as well as provide lower-extremity splinting.
- Occupational therapists focus on helping babies explore the world through movement and senses and respond to caregivers and events adaptively. Occupational therapists address a baby’s upper extremity control for function (calming, hand to mouth and grasping toys), tone management, developmental progression, hand splinting, state control, interaction with caregivers and environment, visual exploration and feeding therapy in collaboration with speech language pathologists as part of a comprehensive feeding team.
- Speech language pathologists focus on facilitating appropriate and functional oral-motor patterns, as well as assessing and treating the quality and safety of the baby’s swallow. Speech language pathologists offer methods of remediation if dysfunction is present through adaptations of feeding technique, equipment, position or consistencies. This is done in collaboration with occupational therapy as part of a comprehensive feeding team. Speech therapy in the NICU promotes communication through encouragement and modeling interaction and engagement and pre-linguistic skills.
