Abstract
Objectives: To assess compliance to outpatient follow-up after discharge from the second stage of the kangaroo method, and a rate of hospital readmission up to 30 days of corrected age. Methods: We ran a cross-sectional study with very low birth weight infants and/or children under 33 weeks of age born from January to December/2019 at the Januário Cicco Maternity School / Natal / RN. For data analysis we used the Shapiro-Wilk, Mann-Whitney and the Fishers Exact tests. Results: Of the 100 newborns included in the study, 13 did not return for outpatient follow-up. Among the 87 (100%) newborns in a row, 6 (6.9%) were readmitted for anemia requiring transfusion; 2 (33.3%) for urinary tract infection; 1 had regurgitation (16,5%); and 1 (16.5%) was undetermined. Newborns with follow-up had higher birth weight, fewer days in mechanical conditions and frequency of grade 3 and 4 peri-intraventricular hemorrhage compared with the no follow-up group. Conclusion: An important number of high-risk newborns did not return for outpatient follow-up, thus being an alert for the team that organized patient discharge. The low rate of readmission, in the first month of corrected age suggests a good condition of the patients at discharge. However, a longer period of observation should be used since the studies showed higher rates of readmission in those assessed up to 12 months of the corrected age.