The paper “Promoting enteral tube feeding safety and performance in preterm infants: A systematic review”, written by Lin Tian, a PhD student at the Macao Polytechnic University, in collaboration with experts from the United States and mainland China, proposes two clinical measures to effectively enhance the safety and efficacy of tube feeding for preterm infants, and was published in the International Journal of Nursing Studies, which is the top international academic journal in “Nursing”. With a Journal Impact Factor (JIF) of 5.837, the journal ranks first amongst more than 100 leading journals in the field of JCR nursing. It is also the top JCR Q1 journal in the category “Nursing” of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), and is also indexed by world-renowned databases such as SSCI, SCIE and Scopus.

Based on the principles of the Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions, Lin and others have identified seven categories of nursing practices to promote feeding safety and performance in preterm infants with enteral tube feeding: controlling feeding interval, selecting feeding position, monitoring gastric residual, disposing of gastric residual, managing feeding temperature, feeding promotion stimulation, and supplementary methods during the transition from tube to oral feeding. After analyzing relevant data from 21 countries and regions around the world, it was finally determined that two clinical measures, oro-motor stimulation and non-nutritive sucking as feeding performance promotion strategies in preterm infants had the most obvious effect on improving the feeding of premature infants.

Effective nutritional support is one of the four cornerstones for improving the survival rate of preterm infants, and improving the safety and efficacy of tube feeding for preterm infants is also an important issue in the care of preterm infants. This study is the first and most comprehensive study on the safety and efficacy of tube feeding for preterm infants, and provides evidence for the development of guidelines on tube feeding for preterm infants.

Lin Tian is the first author and one of the correspondent authors of the paper. She completed the research together with experts and scholars from Virginia Commonwealth University, Guangdong Pharmaceutical University, and Sun Yat-Sen University. The full paper is available at

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0020748922000177

Lin Tian is a PhD student in the Doctor of Philosophy in Public Policy programme at the Macao Polytechnic University. She has a Master’s Degree in Nursing and is a teacher at the School of Nursing of Guangdong Pharmaceutical University, and a visiting scholar at the University of Ottawa in Canada. She is mainly engaged in research on maternal and child care and evidence-based practice. Since pursuing her PhD in Public Policy, she has conducted interdisciplinary research, with a particular focus on public health policy.

Macao Polytechnic University’s Bachelor of Social Sciences in Public Administration programme has been accredited by the Higher Education Evaluation Center of the Ministry of Education and its quality has been recognised. In the past decade or so, the University has also offered the Master of Public Administration (MPA) programme in collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Governance, and the University launched the Doctor of Philosophy in Public Policy in 2020, forming a multi-level system of undergraduate, master and doctoral studies. This field has long been attracting a lot of Macao students, with graduates serving in various public and private sectors in Macao.