Contributor: Terri E. Gorman, MD
, is the Medical Co-Director of the Newborn Intensive Care Unit at 天美传媒l and an Instructor in Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.

As families step off the elevator and enter the newly redesigned Newborn Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at Brigham and Women鈥檚 Hospital, they walk through a welcoming open space with natural light and views of the outdoors.

Creating a comforting and family-centered environment is important in a unit that cares for premature infants, says Dr. Terri Gorman, a neonatologist and Co-Medical Director of the Newborn Intensive Care Unit, which cares for approximately 1,000 premature and sick infants and their families each year.

鈥淗aving a premature baby that needs special medical care can be stressful, and many of the parents who enter the NICU are first-time parents,鈥� says Dr. Gorman, which is one of the reasons why the new facility offers a more open and welcoming environment for families and their babies.

After greeting a friendly unit coordinator at the front desk, families can walk from their baby鈥檚 room to the family lounge area or to the outdoor patio. With no restrictions on visitation, family members can also sleepover on the pull-out sofa in their infant鈥檚 room, and mothers can breastfeed in privacy and store milk in their room鈥檚 private refrigerator. Families can even attend daily rounds with the medical staff, if they want.

Dr. Gorman says, 鈥淲hat sets the NICU apart is that it provides a calm and quiet atmosphere for fragile newborns that need intensive monitoring treatment, but it also provides appropriate care as their conditions stabilize.鈥�

Once stabilized, care shifts from meeting acute medical needs to ensuring the baby interacts with a rich and stimulating environment that includes a flow of people, the auditory stimulation of people鈥檚 voices, and exposure to natural light, helping infants adjust to day-night variations.

鈥淭here is a wonderful multidisciplinary staff to support a baby鈥檚 long-term development, ranging from occupational therapists, physical therapists, and language experts, all of whom evaluate an infant鈥檚 strengths and weaknesses to make sure growth and maturation is on the right track,鈥� says Dr. Gorman.

The staff in the Growth and Development Unit also assist parents in providing skin-to-skin contact in which an infant is placed on the mother鈥檚 or father鈥檚 chest, a practice that has been shown to promote parental bonding and breast milk production. The unit provides a reading program, the Brigham Baby Academy, as research has shown that hearing a parent鈥檚 voice aids neurological development in an infant.

The newly redesigned NICU has also added parent transition rooms where parents prepare to go home with their baby. Dr. Gorman says families and the medical staff have usually formed a close bond by the end of their experience in the NICU. 鈥淥nce babies are healthy enough to go home, many families don鈥檛 want to leave.鈥�