SANCTUM 1.5 STUDY
Alexandra King is one of the U of S researchers examining the experiences of opioid-addicted mothers and their newborns at Sanctum 1.5 in Saskatoon.
An all-female team of University of Saskatchewan researchers is examining if keeping newborns with symptoms of opioid withdrawal together with their mothers could hold health and extended benefits for both mother and child.
The four-year project is funded by a $1.2-million grant from the Canadian Institute for Health Research and will examine the experiences of vulnerable mothers at Sanctum 1.5 in Saskatoon, a prenatal care home for at-risk and Hiv-positive mothers.
“We know that if you’re low income and you don’t have resources, your quality of life is impacted,” said nursing professor and lead researcher Sithokozile Maposa. “So having that support at Sanctum 1.5 is important for that nurturing.”
When a mother uses illicit substances like opioids during pregnancy, the chance that the baby will be born with neonatal abstinence syndrome, or withdrawal, is more than 50 per cent.
In most cases, those babies are separated from their mothers and given morphine in a neonatal intensive care unit.
At Sanctum 1.5, which has already “graduated” 31 mothers and their infants since it opened in late 2018, there have been apparent benefits to keeping the two together, executive director Katelyn Roberts said.
Only two of the 31 babies have had to start on morphine, and Roberts said they used the treatment for considerably less time than is typical. She attributes this to the calming environment, as well as the potential for a baby to ingest some methadone via breast milk if the mother is on an opioid agonist therapy program.
“It’s mostly the skin-toskin touch and the comforting that a mother can bring to a baby,” Roberts said.
The 15-person research team has expertise in a range of areas including epidemiology, health economics and nursing.
Dr. Alexandra King, the Cameco chair in Indigenous Health and Wellness at the University of Saskatchewan and a Sanctum Care Group board member, said the team members’ diverse backgrounds will allow them to look at all aspects of the program.
They will also consult graduated mothers, who bring a wealth of personal insight into the program, King said. “Because of the complexity of what we’re doing, we felt we needed a variety of research talents to understand how this worked.”
Maposa, a midwife, said she believes the program could hold holistic benefits for the mothers and their communities at large.
For example, according to Roberts, all 31 Sanctum graduates who have other children in foster care have had their children returned to them or are in the process of doing so.
“When you have an intervention such as this, it has really positive impacts that will also be intergenerational,” King said.