RDP student continues work aimed at advancing care for newborns and mothers in Alberta

Sep 24, 2026 | 12:19 PM

Red Deer Polytechnic student Haley Zinger is improving care for newborns and mothers who are or have been substance-involved.

She has contributed to the provincial initiative called the Alberta Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome Mother-Baby Care Improvement (NASCENT) since April 2025.

Zinger has helped contribute to the work in eight hospitals, helping change care practices across Alberta for NASCENT, which promotes keeping mothers and infants together after birth rather than separating them for Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) admission.

“For infants exposed to substances during pregnancy, that means mother‑baby togetherness does the work that a NICU admission and medication once did,” Haley said.

Her roles have included data entry, supporting education days for care providers, and contributing to projects that centre the experiences of people with lived and living experience of substance use in pregnancy.

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“These projects use a listening‑first approach, which means sitting down with participants, hearing their stories and using those conversations to guide how we understand and improve care,” she explained.

Zinger has been able to complete the work through an Alberta Innovates Summer Research Studentship and through funding by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).

She collaborated with Recovery Alberta and Acute Care Alberta, where they gathered data before and after enhanced rooming‑in was implemented.

“Comparing the two, we found a rise in breastfeeding rates and a decrease in NICU admissions, which in turn reduces costs for the healthcare system,” Haley said. “Our goal is to continue scaling enhanced rooming‑in across Alberta.”

The NASCENT team is now focused on helping to scale enhanced rooming-in across Alberta and is also preparing publications to share lessons learned more broadly.

For more information about research and innovation at RDP, visit: rdpolytech.ca/innovation.

by rdnewsNOW staff

RDP student continues work aimed at advancing care for newborns and mothers in Alberta

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