To improve familial engagement within Colorado NICUs, hospitals that participate in Embrace form a multidisciplinary team to review existing practices and policies related to parental NICU involvement, collect and submit data about family centered care and parent experience, and use structured quality improvement methods to implement focused interventions and measure outcomes. Critically important, NICU teams are encouraged to integrate experts with lived experience into all aspects of program development and implementation.

To further develop a community of practice, Embrace participants attend an annual forum, which brings together providers, parents, community-based groups, and public health agencies, to share progress and ideas, continue learning, and review performance metrics.

Embrace engages families and NICU clinical team members, supports parental well-being, and empowers parents to care and advocate for their babies through implementation of system improvement processes in policies and practices, guided by robust data collection and analysis.

Recent studies demonstrate that optimizing family engagement in the NICU leads to positive outcomes for both infants and their parents, including higher breastfeeding rates, shorter lengths of hospital stay, improved neurodevelopmental outcomes, and lower stress and anxiety scores for parents.