The smallest patients: the neonatal unit and couplet care, 1981

1981 — today

The mother stays in the room: Newborn intensive care at Memorial began in 1981, and its advancement was a way of arranging care as much as a technology. The unit's own system states the standing in its December 2019 announcement of the state's certification: since its inception in 1981 the neonatal intensive care unit had consistently met the Level III requirements established by the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the Indiana State Department of Health that year certified the unit at Level of Care III for neonatal intensive care, Memorial's obstetric unit with it. The same announcement carries the unit's distinguishing claim, printed here as the system's own: the unit was the first in the country to offer couplet care, the arrangement by which a mother who is still herself a patient stays in the same room as her intensive-care baby rather than being separated from it by floors and visiting hours. The children's hospital's new home, whose institutional record is the Hospitals record's, built the practice into the walls: the 39-bed unit that opened with it in 2017 is made of single-family rooms and couplet-care rooms with a second headwall for the mother's bed, modeled in part on Karolinska's rooms in Sweden, and the design account reports the early measured result — the average length of stay decreased by 1.7 days since couplet care's introduction in the unit. The program's named physician in the record reached is Dr. Robert D. White, director of the Regional Newborn Program, whose name stands on the unit's design literature.

Sources:

1. Beacon Health System release (2 December 2019) — the Indiana State Department of Health's Level of Care III certification for neonatal intensive care and obstetrics; the unit's inception in 1981 and its consistency with the American Academy of Pediatrics' Level III requirements; "the unit was the first in the country to offer couplet care," carried in the entry as the system's own statement.
2. Tradeline (October 2018), "Reimagining the NICU to Support Couplet and Family Care at Beacon Children's Hospital" — the new 39-bed unit of single-family and couplet-care rooms, the Karolinska modeling, and the average length of stay decreased by 1.7 days since couplet care's introduction, as the design account reports.
3. Nexxspan (July 2018) — Robert White, M.D., director of the Regional Newborn Program at Beacon Health, on the new unit's design for close physical contact between premature babies and their parents.