Special Care Nursery with Level II Neonatal Intensive Care Unit

When infants are born requiring a higher level of care, Houston Healthcare offers specialized care in the Special Care Nursery. Our Level II NICU is a special unit for infants born preterm and with other critical conditions. You baby will be cared for by our NICU trained Nursing and Respiratory staff in a caring environment.

Our NICU is specially designed to care for critically ill newborns. Skilled nurses and staff, experienced in the care of NICU babies are on 24/7 duty giving your baby comforting nursing care and providing the medical care the doctor has ordered

General information about our Special Care Nursery

We encourage parents to participate in their child’s care and perform skin-to-skin when possible.

• If your infant must stay hospitalized beyond your hospital stay, we will evaluate census and offer “Nesting” when available. Nesting allows parents to stay in a hospital room for up to 48 hours after discharge when space is available. We do our best to accommodate this whenever possible.

Safety and security concerns for hospitalized infants and children

We will explain our safety program to parents in detail at admission, but here are a few important points:

• Only parents and grandparents are permitted to visit inside of the NICU for infection control reasons.
• Updates provided over the phone are available with passcode.
• Allow only staff with proper hospital picture ID to remove a child from their room for a test, exam or surgery. Parents will accompany them as much as possible.

Infants are special patients, requiring extra attention and care

• An infant will be fed according to their schedule or as the doctor orders. We encourage and support breastfeeding. Moms are encouraged to pump and bring breast milk to the NICU whenever breastfeeding is not an option. Your breast milk will be labeled and stored in our breast milk refrigerator. This allows for your infant to begin receiving your breastmilk as soon as they’re able to begin feeding.

Visiting

Visiting and bonding with your baby is important. However, for our NICU patient’s privacy, health, treatments and recovery, we ask that you observe the following policies:

• Visiting hours all day with the exception of shift change between 6-8 am & pm and at times where staff are actively working to stabilize an infant. We will do our best to accommodate visiting hours to allow for the important bonding to take place.
• A parent or guardian with a matching armband should always be present with their child during visitation.

Discharge home

When the doctor decides that an infant may be discharged home, one of our NICU staff will assist the baby and parents as they prepare to leave.

• They will review any special instructions needed to care for a baby once home
• They will give parents any prescriptions the doctor has written and review important information about these medicines
• They will arrange for someone to accompany the child to the car

Remember the legal requirements for car safety seats in the state of Georgia.

• We request that parents have the appropriate infant car seat and base if applicable installed in the vehicle at the time of discharge. You are permitted to bring your car seat inside and place infant into car seat before discharge if you choose.

A few final thoughts

We appreciate parent’s feedback during and after a baby’s hospitalization.

• We encourage comments and feedback on the care their baby is receiving throughout the hospital stay to help us better serve you and your baby
• We welcome any suggestions and desire to improve at any opportunity to do so that your hospital experience can be remembered in a positive way

Please do not hesitate to contact any of our staff with comments, but especially speak to:

• NICU Charge Nurse: 478-352-5415
• NICU Nurse Manager: 478-352-6276