FEATURE
Recent gifts fund new beds,
web cams and a feeding study
in NICU
Every year, the Blanche Swanzy Lange
Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at
Baylor University Medical Center at Dallas
cares for more than 1,000 infants who need
specialized treatment for everything from
congenital birth defects to extreme prematurity. And because of several recent philanthropic gifts, medical care providers in the
NICU are providing more life-enhancing
services and undertaking groundbreaking
studies to improve the lives of these tiny
patients and their families.
A recent anonymous gift of $470,000
allowed the NICU to purchase new Giraffe
Beds and add high-tech webcam systems
called NICView. A separate gift helped fund
a study that could change the way physicians
and other medical caregivers monitor feeding problems in newborns.
Beds Keep Movement to a Minimum
With the addition of 11 new Giraffe Beds,
the NICU now has 45 of these special incubators, which can be either fully enclosed or
opened at the top to allow medical caregivers access to perform procedures. This means
the baby doesn’t have to be moved to a separate bed for procedures.
The Giraffe Beds are vital to preterm
infants, especially those who have extremely
low birth weight, because they haven’t
12
developed the mechanisms to maintain
their body temperature.
Incubator with a View
The gift also helped purchase 35 NICView
camera systems. These systems provide
mothers and families whose infants are not
ready to head home the capability to stay
connected to baby remotely via a secured
website. Using the website, they can see realtime views of their baby through the camera attached to the baby’s bed.
The NICView systems, which have been
available to families since February 2015, have
received much praise from families. “Parents
love this system,” said Gina Reynolds, nurse
manager of the NICU. “It gives them peace
of mind.
The system also tracks data such as who
is logging in and from where. In April
alone, families had logged on 5,500 times.
Better Insight Into Feeding Problems
Philanthropic support has also funded a
groundbreaking study that could change the
way infants who have feeding problems are
monitored. When a baby has trouble feeding, as many infants in the NICU do, physicians order the “gold standard” of tests –
an X-ray – to determine what is going wrong.
This standard has several drawbacks: it
exposes the baby to radiation; it can only
take a still-view snapshot of how the baby is
swallowing; and it can only be done while a
baby is bottle-feeding, not breastfeeding.
While it helps identify why a baby has trouble bottle-feeding, the X-ray can’t be used to
prove or disprove whether breastfeeding is
safe.
“After an X-ray, we’d often identify the
source of the problem, and we could usually fix it,” said Chrysty Sturdivant, a neonatal occupational therapist. “But sometimes a baby who has trouble on a bottle
will breastfeed beautifully. We just couldn’t
prove that breastfeeding is safe.”
This meant that health care providers
couldn’t legally recommend to a mother
that she breastfeed – devastating news for
mothers who want to breastfeed their baby.
Chrysty and fellow neonatal occupational
therapist Sandra Carroll, along with Jenny
Reynolds, a neonatal speech and language
therapist, decided to create a study that could
investigate how a baby swallows during breastfeeding. It’s called FEES – Fiberoptic Endoscopic
Evaluation of Swallowing – in the NICU. It
involves inserting a tiny, fiberoptic camera into
the baby’s nose while he or she is breastfeeding.
Philanthropic support enabled Baylor Dallas to
purchase the equipment to perform these
evaluations.