The Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at the Health Sciences Centre is a 60 bed neonatal intensive care unit (although funded for 50 beds), that provides specialty care to neonates from Manitoba, Northwestern Ontario, and Nunavut. This patient population includes, but is not limited to, preterm infants, very low birth weight infant, and infants born with medical or surgical conditions requiring specialized medical care within the NICU.
Prior to the move to the New Women’s Hospital in December of 2019, the NICU was located in three different geographical locations scattered throughout HSC, in an open pod style unit. The new NICU, however, primarily has single patient rooms, divided into 5 pods that extend over the length of a football field. Thus, in order to ensure that safe patient care was maintained in the new environment, locally streamed cameras that allowed the nurses to monitor the babies from within each pod was an absolute requirement for the move. This, in conjunction with the Vocera technology and the cardiorespiratory monitoring via the Philips monitors, enables nurses to safely monitor more than one patient, whilst in the POD, without physically being in each room.
Parents and caregivers of infants admitted to the NICU experience high levels of stress and trauma, primarily related to parent-infant separation, and feelings of helplessness; this parental stress was especially heightened due to the visitor restrictions associated with the recent pandemic. Although parental stress cannot be completely irradicated, the implementation of a family-integrated video streaming solution, that enables parents to view their admitted NICU infant remotely, will minimize parental stress and parent-infant separation, and improve the overall experience of the admission at HSC.
As such NICU has a requirements for a camera based solution/service that needs to be movable and adjustable, streamed to locally monitors located outside each room in the POD, and the ability to securely and remotely be streamed by parents or caregivers on a remote device (PC, Tablet or Cell Phone), with parameters adjusted by the nurse.
