Background:

Promoting physical contact, especially skin-to-skin contact, immediately or as soon as possible in preterm newborns is still a challenge.

Objective:

To determine the prevalence of physical contact between mothers and preterm newborns at birth and to analyze the association between the type of physical contact between them in the delivery room and the prevalence of exclusive breastfeeding at hospital discharge.

Methodology:

Cross-sectional study with a nonprobability sample of 78 mothers and 79 preterm newborns. Data were collected from July to November 2017, through interviews and medical records, and analyzed through descriptive statistics and Poisson Regression with robust variance.

Results:

The prevalence of any type of physical contact in the delivery room was 51.9%, without statistical difference between the type of physical contact between mothers and infants and exclusive breastfeeding at discharge.

Conclusion:

Physical contact by touching and kissing after birth did not influence the prevalence of exclusive breastfeeding at hospital discharge.

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