Nurses struggle with over crowded Neonatology

19TH FEB 2019

Today nurse Gloriose and I were responsible for one each of the babies in this incubator. We have 16 beds in our intensive care room, but that doesn’t mean we only have 16 babies! Very many times, we have 20-25 babies in our intensive care room. When it is twins there are usually no problems having 2 babies sharing a bed. But other times we must put unrelated babies in the same incubator, and that can be tricky. Neither baby can have an infection that can be passed on, they need to be about the same size and need the same amount of heat in the incubator.

Babies having seizures must always have their own bed. Any babies having jaundice must go under the phototherapy light but there are only two lights in the unit and many times there are more jaundiced babies than lights so do they go in a crib or share an incubator…?

In under resourced hospitals you are forced to make choices that simply do not occur in other environments. In 2018 our infant mortality rate was only 3.7% so despite the challenges we are saving lives and bringing joy and Jesus’s love to the families in the community we serve!!