Stamford Health launches new NICU

Stamford Health held a ribbon cutting ceremony on June 22 at the second floor of the Whittingham Pavilion for the new Cohen Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU).

The new facility incorporates the latest technologies and best practices in the field of caring for newborn infants, including 15 Isolettes, the latest make and model of incubators from Dräger. Each one is located in a separate room with a door which can offer families privacy, a major departure from older NICU designs.

“In the past babies basically shared the adjacent space next to each other,” said Dr. Gerald Rakos, the director of Stamford Health’s Division of Neonatology and chairman of the Department of Pediatrics. “Now we have totally private spaces for parents, we’ve got an overnight facility for parents to stay overnight should we want to, and we’ve got three twin rooms which allows us to care for them in the same room without parents having to shift between rooms.”

“There’s good data that says babies who are in individual rooms can develop quicker, that they can grow better because it’s quieter,” he added. “And it’s just a nicer environment, it’s more private and decreases the risk of infections because you only have one family in that room.”

Rakos also observed that “while single rooms have certain clear advantages, we’ve actually found over the years that some families benefit from close interactions with other families, interactions that are actually facilitated when they’re in a shared space. As an example, we had two families that bonded and became lifelong friends, so much so that their premature babies grew up being best friends and went to the junior prom together.”

Rakos oversaw the opening of Stamford Health’s first NICU, and by his count the new Cohen NICU is the sixth he has overseen in Stamford, not counting temporary spaces set up during renovations. He also took the occasion of the ribbon cutting to mark his retirement after 38 years at Stamford Health.

He noted that in his time the hospital has gone from delivering 1,200 babies a year with 50 to 60 needing transfer to the NICU to close to 2,500 per year with single digit numbers of transferred babies.

“Each NICU built upon our previous version, expanding our capacity and our understanding of how to best care for these precious babies,” he said.

Kathleen Silard, the president and CEO of Stamford Health, noted that she started her own career in medicine working as a NICU nurse, rendering the project close to her heart. She thanked the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Foundation for their $5 million gift to build the new NICU and highlighted Robin, Adam and Catalina Whittingham who were in attendance to celebrate the refurbishment of the structure built with their family’s donation 20 years ago.

“I have said many, many times that Stamford Health is so fortunate to benefit from a generous and highly involved community,” Silard said. “You’ve proven that to be true once again. You’ve proven it over and over as we’ve raised funds to reimagine the mother and baby services at the Whittingham Pavilion and to better create and to cater to the tastes of today’s patients.”