Newborn Assessment

Until the 1970s, newborn assessment basically meant an assessment of a newborn’s physical and physiologic systems to look for problems, complications, abnormalities, illness, or disease that warranted medical attention. At that time, the Apgar score (0–10) was the gold standard focusing on assessing newborns’ respiration, motor tone, cardiac function, reflexes, and appearance. However, around this time, the term newborn assessment started to take on an additional meaning as new discoveries and an explosion of research began to document that, far from being a collection of primitive, spinal reflexes, and a passive recipient of input from the environment, the newborn was equipped with a sophisticated repertoire of behavior that was not random but meaningful and organized. Moreover, newborn neurobehavior could be reliably evaluated and measured, even ...