Childrens Hospital Los Angeles -- Center for Newborn and Infant Critical Care

The Childrens Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) Center for Newborn and Infant Critical Care (CNICC) is a state-of-the-art intensive care facility designed to address the needs of critically ill infants. The CNICC is a tertiary/quaternary provider for newborn care that has access to a wide range of pediatric medical and surgical subspecialists and ancillary services that allow treatment across the full range of neonatal problems. The CNICC is a 36-bed unit with an average daily census of 30 patients. The neonatal intensive care team provides complex, multidisciplinary treatment for over 400 critically ill neonates per year.

Particularly because of the presence of a large referral base in the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area, Southern California and other states such as Nevada, Arizona and Hawaii, the most challenging neonatal disease conditions are transported in on a continual basis, typically by helicopter and occasionally by fixed-wing aircraft. These difficult cases include those associated with complications of extreme prematurity, the various causes of persistent pulmonary hypertension of the newborn, preterm and term neonates with congenital heart disease often having multiple other congenital anomalies, a host of general pediatric surgical and surgical subspecialty conditions, and also not infrequently, very rare diseases. Due to the complexity and critical condition of these cases, a carefully orchestrated and extremely well-organized multidisciplinary approach is required and practiced under the direction of the attending neonatologist. Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO, or "heart-lung bypass"), as the only remaining life-saving treatment modality, is provided for the most critically ill neonates in this CNICC, which runs the largest ECMO program in Southern California. It is important to emphasize that treatment of neonates with this level of complexity and disease severity can only be performed at an institution like the Childrens Hospital Los Angeles where the intellectual, medical, nursing, ancillary and general institutional infrastructure to support the multidisciplinary needs of these tiny patients is available. « Read More