Temple Health's expanded NICU offers families privacy, innovation

PHILADELPHIA (WPVI) -- No new parent wants their newborn to spend their first days in an intensive care unit.

But when it does happen, innovation and solid comprehensive care in the NICU can still help babies and their parents get off to the best start possible.

Stephanie Robinson's first pregnancy was going smoothly, until the unexpected happened.

"At 30 weeks, I went in for my gestational diabetes screening," she says.

Robinson's blood pressure was way up, and not coming down.

"You are presenting with severe preeclampsia features," she says she was told. "I was really scared. I came in for a routine doctor's appointment and didn't leave the hospital."

Within a week, doctors at Temple Women and Families hospital decided to deliver her son, Calvin, two months early. He went into Temple's new, expanded NICU.

"Our NICU is double the size it was," physician's assistant Patrician McMahon says. "We can hold 42 beds."

McMahon, a long-time NICU veteran, says separate rooms for babies give families privacy for breastfeeding and healing when their world seems upside down.

"From the very beginning, absolutely everything is out of control," for them, she says. "In the old place, you could never have peace because there were alarms going off."

McMahon says the NICU lays a foundation so babies like Calvin get a solid start and can continue thriving at home.

"The parents have to be involved from the beginning," she says.

Robinson says she was helping the nurses with taking his temperature and changing his diaper.

"You're just feeling like they're so fragile. But the nurses were just giving me the confidence just to hold him," says Robinsin. She adds it helped to deepen the parent-infant bond.

Calvin also benefitted from another advantage to the new NICU - having physical, occupational, and speech therapists there every day, not just on call.

"So he could just build up those muscles and being able to just suck properly and then swallow," says Robinson.

She also credits a non-profit which has a strong presence at Temple.

"Today is a Good Day, which provides support for NICU families at Temple. They visited me often in the hospital just to check on me and to check on my son," she says.

And the group was invaluable during the holidays.

"For Thanksgiving, they deliver meals for all of the parents there, which was very helpful for us because with the stresses of having a baby in the NICU, we weren't even thinking about cooking Thanksgiving dinner. Just very grateful for that, too. They provided the turkey and sides and just all the fixings there. That was a big blessing, too," says Robinson.

After six weeks, Calvin went home, and he's doing great three months later.

"He was three pounds, 13.4 ounces when he was born. Now he's 11 pounds," she says proudly. "He'll probably start to teethe early because he's just wanting to gnaw on a lot of things!"