I think the right econ-jargon way to think about this is that they are “complements in production”: The activities that promote skin-to-skin contact make it very natural to also promote breastfeeding. Indeed, that’s one part of why skin-to-skin contact is helpful! It would be odd to have a skin-to-skin promotion program that doesn’t also promote breastfeeding, I mean.
Maybe implicit in your question is the guess that the nurses more or less tell the moms about skin-to-skin contact and then they go along their way and do it. But in fact, the skin-to-skin part is pretty labor intensive too, because it requires keeping the moms present in the hospital and engaged in the effort, instead of giving up and going home. Yes, there’s some troubleshooting (the angle, the KMC wrap, …). But more than that, there’s a lot of cheerleading (“How’s it going?” “You’re doing great!” “Keep it up!”), which is often a big part of good nursing care, and especially here. Part of what the program is doing—by helping the moms have what they need in terms of food, bathroom opportunities, and encouragement—is helping the moms feel good about the long slog of getting these babies up to a safer weight and ready to eat and grow.
I ran this question by a colleague who wrote back: “I think [mere] information campaigns that show parents doing KMC for LBW babies in healthcare settings and at home would be a good idea, and I think that having non-nursing staff (say ward ayas) teaching parents KMC in a hospital setting would be better than not doing so, but I don’t think we should expect large effects.
“It takes time for the mothers to learn positioning and wrapping (KMC can be unsafe without these inputs), and the constant checking and temperature measurement and encouragement matter to getting mothers to do enough hours.
“I would say, if you have the option of using trained nursing staff, you should. If you don’t, then by all means give people the [mere] information that prolonged skin to skin contact is beneficial for their LBW newborn. But it is not a close second best.”
Thanks for asking! Both of these turn out to be questions at the research frontier.
On 1:
The public-hospital survival advantage in Uttar Pradesh (and a few similar states in north India) is surprising! There’s a literature in development economics that public and private service delivery fails in different ways, because of different incentives. Private providers are paid more when they appear to be doing more, so they often provide unnecessary, or even harmful “treatments.” These interventions tend to do more harm than good for most births. Patients unfortunately don’t know this; healthcare is a setting where information asymmetry is severe.
This is an active research area for our team: We’re working on an NIH grant application, and Nathan Franz (a PhD student at UT) is doing great dissertation research on this topic. As a rough answer, private providers have an economic incentive to do things to the baby that they can charge for, so they separate the mom and baby and, say, wash the baby, which might delay breastfeeding or make it cold. Public providers more or less leave the mom and baby alone, which tends to be the best plan for most newborns. I should also note that the data supporting the public-facility survival advantage is about the average baby, not about the low birthweight and premature babies that r.i.c.e.’s program targets (even the big Demographic and Health Survey doesn’t have enough of those babies to have enough statistical power to draw conclusions about that group).
There’s more detail and not every case is the average case, but there’s an interesting implication for our project: If, as the years go on and word gets out, improving care in public facilities attracts more births to happen in public rather than private facilities, that could be a positive externality even for babies who are not small or premature enough to be eligible for this program.
On 2:
Different babies need different things, so there is no one right answer. Hospitals in rich countries are able to provide many more interventions that improve survival chances for the smallest and most preterm babies than hospitals in poor settings, such as Uttar Pradesh. For example, breathing support (ventilators and CPAP) and continuous vital sign monitoring are available in almost all rich country settings. Sometimes these interventions are compatible with KMC and other times they are not. Where they are, doctors and nurses in rich countries are increasingly combining them with KMC. The iKMC trial I talked about occurred in more of a middle-income setting where KMC was combined with continuous vital signs monitoring, but none of the babies were on ventilators, for example. That study found improved outcomes relative to keeping the baby in a radiant warmer with vital sign monitoring.
In settings where staff and machines are scarce, KMC is the standard of care. Given the staff shortages, the cost of machines, and the difficulties of training staff to use those machines, I would argue that it would do more good to expand Kangaroo Care to more babies in poor country settings rather than be able to serve a much smaller number of babies with rich-country style care.