Neonatal Intensive Care Unit: An introduction

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As new parents you eagerly look forward to bringing your baby home, so it can be frightening if your newborn needs to be admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). At first it may seem like a foreign place, but understanding the NICU and what goes on there can help reduce your fears and let you better help your baby. A neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) is a unit of a hospital specialising in the care of very ill or premature newborn infants. With special life support equipments designed for newborn babies and managed by doctors (Neonatologists or Paediatric Intensivist) and nurses who have special training in taking care of very sick newborn babies.

Besides prematurity and extreme low weight, common diseases cared for in a NICU include birth asphyxi, severe life threatening infections, jaundice of newborn, respiratory difficulty due to immaturity of the lungs and major birth defects. A newborn baby may spend a day of observation in a NICU or may spend many months there.

Advances in medicine and technology have greatly increased the survival of very low birth weight and extremely premature infants. In the era before NICUs, infants of birth weight less than 1400 grams rarely survived.

What to Expect in the NIC?

Walking into the NICU can feel like stepping on to another planet-the environment is probably unlike anything you’ve experienced. The unit is often busy, with lots of activity, people moving around, and beeping monitors.

Once settled in the unit, your baby will receive care tailored to your little one’s specific needs. Most NICU babies are on special feeding schedules, depending on their level of development or any problem they have. For instance, some infants are too premature or too sick to eat on their own, so they have a feeding tube that runs through the month and into the stomach. Others need high-calorie diets to help them grow.

Medications are another crucial part of NICU care-your child may take antibiotics, medicine to stimulate breathing, or something to help his or her blood pressure or heart rate, for example.
To know about your baby’s condition better the baby’s doctor may order various tests periodically. For infants whose care is complicated and involved, the doctors or nurses will place a very small plastic tubing into an artery or vein so they can draw blood without having to repeatedly stick the baby. The NICU staff will try to make the baby’s stay in the nursery as comforting as possible for the infant as well as the families. Your baby’s doctors can explain what all of the monitors, tubes, tests, and machines do, which will go a long way toward demystifying the NICU.

Here is a brief introduction of equipments that may be required for your baby depending on your baby’s condition to help recovery.

Infant warmers: These are open beds with servo controlled automatic radiant heaters over them. Parents can touch their babies in the warmers.

Incubator: These are small beds enclosed by a clear, hard plastic shell specially meant for care of very premature infants. The temperature of the incubator is controlled and closely monitored because premature infants frequently have difficult maintaining their body heat doctors can examine the infants and parents can touch their babies.

Monitors: Infants in the NICU are attached to monitors which pick up and display all the necessary information in one place so doctors and nurses are constantly aware of the baby’s vital signs. The monitor is secured to your baby’s body with chest leads, which are small painless stickers connected to wires.

Phototherapy: Often, premature infants or those newborns who have infections have jaundice Phototherapy is a special blue light used to help decrease the level of bilirubin that causes jaundice.

Ventilators: Babies in the NICU sometimes need extra help to breathe. The infant with difficulty in breathing due to immaturity or infection of the lung is connected to the ventilator which a specialised machine which helps the baby breathe via an endotracheal tube.