Stamford Health launches new NICU

BY JUSTIN MCGOWN jmcgown@westfairinc.com

Stamford Health held a ribbon cutting ceremony June 22 on the second floor of the Whittingham Pavilion for the new Cohen Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU).

The new facility incorporates the latest technologies and best practices in the field of caring for newborn infants, including 15 Isolettes, the latest make and model of incubators from Dräger. Each one is located in a separate room with a door which can offer families privacy, a major departure from older NICU designs.

“In the past babies basically shared the adjacent space next to each other,” said Dr. Gerald Rakos, the director of Stamford Health’s Division of Neonatology and chairman of the Department of Pediatrics. “Now we have totally private spaces for parents, we’ve got an overnight facility for parents to stay overnight should we want to, and we’ve got three twin rooms, which allows us to care for them in the same room without parents having to shift between rooms.”

“There’s good data that says babies who are in individual rooms can develop quicker, that they can grow better because it’s quieter,” he added. “And it’s just a nicer environment, it’s more private and decreases the risk of infections because you only have one family in that room.”

Rakos also observed that “while single rooms have certain clear advantages, we’ve actually found over the years that some families benefit from close interactions with other families, interactions that are actually facilitated when they’re in a shared space. As an example, we had two families that bonded and became lifelong friends, so much so that their premature babies grew up being best friends and went to the junior prom together.”

Rakos oversaw the opening of Stamford Health’s first NICU, and by his count the new Cohen NICU is the sixth he has overseen in Stamford, not counting temporary spaces set up during renovations. He also downloaded, as is the case with some of the larger delivery services that can lean on widespread name recognition to put people at ease. That is why he is making it a priority to allow for PayPal payments on the app, which provides an added level of security and privacy to orders.

“We offer a more personal experience, a more local experience,” Reeves said of where his customer service focus originates. “We know the area; we know the clientele. We know how folks in this area want to be treated on a personal level, I was an employee at Cablevision for 10 years. So, I had experience dealing with customers in

Wilton, Easton, and Redding and having long conversations with folks. I know what they want and expect from the people that help them out. GrubHub and Uber don’t always hire drivers with that particular knowledge for dealing with clientele in this area.” took the occasion of the ribbon cutting to mark his retirement after 38 years at Stamford Health.

More than 40 restaurants from across Fairfield County offer delivery through Eatztime, and Reeves said he is actively courting new eateries to join the network — especially since he has drivers interested in working with him.

“I want to tell people to give a call to their favorite restaurant and have them give us a call so we can add them,” Reeves added.

He noted that in his time the hospital has gone from delivering 1,200 babies a year with 50 to 60 needing transfer to the NICU to close to 2,500 per year with single digit numbers of transferred babies.

“Each NICU built upon our previous version, expanding our capacity and our understanding of how to best care for these precious babies,” he said.

Kathleen Silard, the president and CEO of Stamford Health, noted that she started her own career in medicine working as a NICU nurse, rendering the project close to her heart. She thanked the Steven and Alexandra Cohen Foundation for their $5 million gift to build the new NICU and highlighted Robin, Adam and Catalina Whittingham who were in attendance to celebrate the refurbishment of the structure built with their family’s donation 20 years ago.

“I have said many, many times that

Stamford Health is so fortunate to benefit from a generous and highly involved community,” Silard said. “You’ve proven that to be true once again. You’ve proven it over and over as we’ve raised funds to reimagine the mother and baby services at the Whittingham Pavilion and to better create and to cater to the tastes of today’s patients.”