Kaiser Roseville expands neonatal ICU: 12 new rooms bring together newborns, family
Kaiser Permanente unveiled an expanded neonatal intensive care Wednesday at its Roseville Medical Center, an addition that has 12 mostly private rooms for the most at-risk preemies and their families.
“Since our Roseville Women and Children’s Center opened in 2009, we’ve had an increase of 50 percent in terms of babies born here,” said Dr. Thomas Lai, chief of neonatology at Kaiser Roseville Medical Center. “More patients and their families have needed care as well. We provide care for those sick babies and premature babies that are born not just upstairs … here but also from surrounding hospitals transported here for our pediatric expertise.”
Because of COVID-19 restrictions recommended by federal health officials, entrance to hospitals is restricted, so Lai and other Kaiser Roseville staff and physicians gave a live tour of their new space virtually on social media.
Joining them from a location outside the hospital was Roseville Mayor Krista Bernasconi, who is a mom of twins born premature at the hospital. She thanked the Kaiser team for providing the foundation and care that her children needed to become the healthy teenagers the are today.
“Parents with a child or children in the NICU just want a few things in those scary moments: They want to know capacity to have their child cared for. They want the most skilled hands, and they want space to focus on what’s most important — their baby,” added Bernasconi. “This expansion makes that all of that possible.”
In total, Kaiser’s Roseville Medical Center now has 60 beds for preemies, noted Dr. Richard Florio, the hospital’s physician-in-chief. Seven of the new rooms are private, Lai noted, but some have connecting, sliding doors that allow nurses and other care providers to move from one patient to another.
Two of the new rooms have negative pressure systems that divert air out of the hospital, Lai explained, noting that those rooms can be used for preemies who have contagious diseases. Three other rooms are connected and can house triplets, three babies from three separate families, or a set of twins and a singlet from two different families, he said.
“Our NICU is currently just pods, which is six beds in one room, and so we didn’t have negative pressure rooms here to help take care of babies with specialized infections,” Lai said. “We would have to locate them somewhere else in the hospital, so this way, they’re able to stay in the NICU, and we’re able to take care of them down here as opposed to having to travel to other parts of the hospital.”
There are two separate rooms where nurses can prepare medication and breast milk to give to the babies, said Debbie Reitter, Kaiser Roseville’s chief nurse executive. One registered nurse on the NICU team, Vinder Dhillon, said the new space is just more welcoming for families of newborns who will be in the hospital for a long stretch of time.
“I’m very excited because, right now, we have all the babies in the same pod,” Dhillon said, “and these individual rooms will give our chronic long-term babies and their families the privacy that they need before they go home — and independence.”
This story was originally published February 4, 2021 at 8:00 AM.
