Nominal deviation in neonatal intensive care units: A time trend analysis

摘要

Anecdotal reports inneonatal intensive care units (NICUs) suggest changes in naming patterns towards the more esoteric. This overdue time trend analysis looks at admission names from 3 years in a busy Southern England tertiary NICU. There is evidence of potential harm (educational and societal) related to unusual names.To test the hypothesis that NICU babies' naming practices have veered from the norm in 25 years. Children's names were divided into quintiles ranked by popularity: names lst-5th most popular (A), 6th-10th (B), llth-20th (C), 20th-40th (D) and 41st onwards (E). Using the ONS registry of UK births1 we derived expected frequencies for each quintile. Names were extracted from ward admission books for 3 months from 1987, 1996 and 2011. Each name was allocated to a quintile according to its popularity for that year. Quintile frequencies were calculated and compared using the X~2 test with expected frequencies for each year and over time from 1987 to 2011.