In May of this year, Children’s Health Foundation was pleased to provide the members of the J. P. Bickell Foundation with a report on the impact of your past generosity to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at Children’s Hospital.
In this report you will find more information about our NICU and the equipment you have made possible for the most fragile patients at Children’s Hospital.
Our current request to the J. P. Bickell Foundation is for a Point of Care Ultrasound machine.
Children’s Hospital’s NICU is a Level III unit, meaning they care for the sickest and smallest of neonates. Babies are transported from across our wide region of Western Ontario to London for advanced care.
As one of the busiest NICUs in Canada, which is designated to increase from 46 to 52 beds in the near future, they care for approximately 1,000 babies each year.
Our unit strives to stay on the cutting-edge. Leveraging medical advancements and new technology allows them to save more babies than they were able to previously with excellent long-term outcomes as healthy children and adults.
POCUS is now the standard of care in NICUs in other countries and in adult Intensive Care Units, and is quickly becoming so for Paediatric Critical Care Units and Emergency Departments.
Also, if the NICU at Children’s Hospital is going to be able to continue to provide full training for new neonatal specialists, who will be accredited by the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, they will need to acquire POCUS skills using the most up-to-date technology.
POCUS is a critical addition to the NICU’s fleet.
Portable to the bedside, it will provide our neonatologists with a “window” into a baby’s organs, such as the brain, lungs, blood vessels, gastrointestinal tract, and kidneys, without risk of radiation, at any time of the day or night.
It will be used to evaluate structure (for anomalies), and look for hemorrhages, lesions and abnormal collections of fluid in or around these organs.
The information gleaned from this equipment will contribute to life saving decisions about care. The machine will also help with putting in intravenous lines into tiny veins of babies without “guessing” where.
The goal is for all the neonatologists in our NICU to be able to use the POCUS. Our newest neonatologist, Dr. Renjini Lalitha, was trained on POCUS in Edmonton. She will share her knowledge with her fellow neonatologists at Children’s Hospital and then train the nurses who will use the equipment to guide IV placement, etc.
Penny Harman
Senior Philanthropy Officer
Children’s Health Foundation
548-689-9251
pharman@childhealth.ca
