Golisano Children鈥檚 Hospital Celebrates Renovation Completion of Neonatal Intensive Care Unit
The Strong Memorial Hospital Nursery, a state-of-the-art facility that provides care for newborns in the Finger Lakes region, reopens on Wednesday. The renovated space, part of the Golisano Children’s Hospital Gosnell NICU, will house 24 beds that are predominately single family spaces. The region’s only Level IV NICU, the facility now has the capacity to care for 68 infants, including the 44 beds in the new children’s hospital tower which opened in July 2015.
The renovated space will house 16 private rooms and a transitional care nursery with eight beds. The transitional care nursery will focus on care for babies who need intense observation and monitoring, but whose mothers are inpatient. The private rooms will not only allow for more space, but also support infection control and enable parents to more actively participate in their child’s care.
“Our NICU has the latest design elements and the best innovative technology that was available to make it the safest, most advanced NICU for patient care,” said Carl D’Angio, Chief of the Division of Neonatology at Golisano Children’s Hospital. “This renovation not only provides parents with more privacy, but our neonatologists more space to care for the babies we see.”
Along with the newly refurbished unit, the SMH Nursery will feature top-of-the-line technology. Just like in the new tower, a variety of beds, warmers, incubators and cribs are available to the baby. Parents can also utilize omnibeds (Giraffe beds), which function as incubators and warmers so the more fragile babies don’t have to be moved between the two. Babies will also be able to be weighed on a built-in scale. With dimmer light capabilities and a device to monitor sound level, the new rooms provide the optimal environment for babies' hearing, growth and overall development.
The new SMH nursery will also be equipped to take bedside digital x-rays, ultrasounds, electroencephalograms (EEGs), and pulmonary function tests. Those images and tracings will be available online to doctors in other parts of the hospital or at home.
The third floor bridge that connects Strong Memorial Hospital to the NICU in the children’s hospital tower allows mothers on the high-risk obstetrics unit (3-1200) to be close to their newborns.
Designated a Level IV NICU — the highest classification — Golisano Children’s Hospital’s NICU is capable of caring for the tiniest and sickest patients in the Finger Lakes region.