Introduction:

The Pan American Health Organization reports that few countries worldwide apply skin-to-skin contact and when they use it is during an inadequate amount of time despite the multiple benefits for the mother and the newborn.

Objective:

To describe the application of skin-to-skin contact from the experience of the health team in a public maternal and child center in Peru.

Methods:

A qualitative research with a descriptive design, case study, was carried out in a non-probabilistic sample of 10 members of the health team, chosen by convenience and determined by saturation and redundancy. Data were collected through semi-structured online interviews. The information was processed manually, through thematic content analysis.

Results:

Three categories were obtained: a) application of skin-to-skin contact in the immediate care of the newborn, b) strategies implemented for the application of skin-to-skin contact, and c) barriers faced by the health team to apply skin-to-skin contact.

Conclusions:

From the experience of health personnel, it is possible to apply skin-to-skin contact after training and sensitization to the health team and conditioning of the environment, in order to implement it as a policy of the health facility.