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New NICU Technology
June 27, 2008 |
Michelle Waddell is the Director of Neonatal Services at The Children’s Hospital
of Southwest Florida. She says expanding the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit has
always a plan for the future.
“We’ve known all along that with the growth in the population and the increase
in our census that we needed a new unit, that we needed new beds.” Now two years
and more than $2,000,000 later the Shelley and Jack Blais Neonatal Center is
open.
The facility added six new beds for the most fragile premature babies in our
area. “The types of babies we’re going to be moving into that unit are generally
born less than a thousand grams. Those babies really need an environment I guess
as close to the uterine environment as possible,” says neonatologist Dr. William
Liu.
Architects and physicians worked together to custom design the unit to help
support a baby’s brain development. Michelle says, “We know through research
that the neo-natal brain, very tiny, very fragile and it is very susceptible to
all of the things we do in the environment. We address light, sound especially.”
Each tiny patient in the new NICU unit has their own room. This helps physicians
control the environment more easily than they would be able to in an open ICU
setting. Dr. Liu says, “When they’re in separate rooms especially with the
acoustically friendly flooring and wall surfaces and ceilings the noise levels
are much lower. We like to keep the light levels low especially for babies less
than 30 or 31 weeks.” A single room also means more one on one time for parents
and their newborns. Dr. Liu says, “We want to encourage the families to be with
the babies as much as possible so that the baby can be exposed to the mother,
her scent, her voice.”
Michelle says the individual rooms also help the emotional state of the family
unit. “It’s huge for the parents this way you kind of have private time to be
happy or sad or worry or do whatever you need to do.” The hallways in the new
unit can actually mimic ambient lighting. So when a baby reaches 31 weeks they
can be exposed to a daytime and nighttime environment.
Physicians say the new unit also allows them to better deal with the acute
diseases of each baby. |
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