A New NICU Space for SCH

As most of you know, I (Michelle) am the head of our pediatric unit and neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). Neonatal care is separated into the normal babies who may need a few days of breathing support or antibiotics but are otherwise stable, and the high acuity babies who are often suffering from many complications of prematurity and need a high level of cares for weeks or months. We have put a lot of resources into making the best space we could to care for these fragile babies in a safe manner. We have had many many sweet "wins" sending home healthy babies, but we also see death regularly.

This has been a especially difficult year in our NICU. Starting in November we started to have a significant increase in our neonatal admission rates and also our neonatal deaths, especially the babies in our acute care room. After much investigation and consultation, we concluded that we have been having an outbreak of hospital acquired infections. By God’s perfect timing, one of our missionary partners that started last year is an infectious disease doctor and one of our Ethiopian lab technicians is just finishing his masters in microbiology. Dr Joakim and Teshale worked hard to help us identify the sources of infection and to more accurately diagnose specific infections in our babies.

There is so much more to the story. There are the late nights staying up to try one more thing, adjust one more setting, change one more medicine, just to have these tiny babies die with their bodies full of infection. We were here to give them their best chance, but was something we were doing hurting them? We reached out around the world for advice and hope. So much more sleep was lost studying and reviewing everything we do to come to a solution. We reviewed our protocols our procedures and finally we knew that we were doing the best with what we had.

But maybe that wasn't good enough, maybe something had to change. We couldn't bring fragile premature babies into this space where recurring infections were present.  We decided the best solution was to revamp the whole space to give us more room. Though sweat (literally, it is a very hot space) and many tears, we have doubled the size of our acute care room so we can keep these babies properly isolated from each other and give the nurses space to work in a more sterile way.  We moved into our new space in May after we gathered to pray over the place and pray over the lives of the babies and their families that would be admitted there.

We are so happy to report that the changes and the prayers worked. Soon after opening we had the joy of admitting and caring for, and discharging safely a baby with a severe infection. She stayed in our NICU for 2.5 months and through our efforts she is alive today.

Praying over the new NICU space