LAS VEGAS (KTNV) — The NICU at Sunrise Children's Hospital in East Las Vegas is the most advanced in the state of Nevada.
They were the first in the state to offer a treatment that works to protect an infant's brain from injury, and the only hospital to offer Neonatal Extracorporeal Menmbrane Oxygenation (ECMO) for the smallest patients with severe heart and lung problems.
The advanced treatments bring patients from all over the state and beyond.
"I would say, on average, about 10% of our patients from outside the Las Vegas area," said Dr. Patricia Ramsay, the director of the NICU.
The NICU at Sunrise Children's cares for about a thousand babies a year. More than 100 of those babies come in with very low birth-weights that are less than three pounds.
"It takes a great deal of skill for the nursing and the respiratory therapy staff to take care of these very tiny babies," Ramsay said.
About 30 nurses take care of 60 to 65 babies in the NICU at Sunrise everyday. Dr. Ramsay says the average stay of a baby in the NICU is about 21 days, but added that extremely low birth-weight babies could stay for three to four months or even longer.
Although it's hard work for NICU staff, once a year they're able to reunite with some of the children they helped nurse back to health.
"All of the children that have graduated from the NICU from the previous five years and even longer, their parents can come back and give us an opportunity to see how well they've grown," Ramsay said. "It's so nice and rewarding to see them healthy and running around, driving their parents crazy."
Dr. Ramsay says that prenatal care is critical for mothers to help prevent premature births and identify any potential life threatening problems early on.
