A Tide of Opioid-Dependent Newborns Forces Doctors to Rethink Treatment
By the time the team is on the scene, said Kelly Turner, a veteran transport nurse,
beleaguered staff will meet it at the door and say, “We’re glad you’re here.”
The babies are taken to a multilevel pediatric hospital that has a Level 4 neonatal intensive care unit, the highest level of care.
In another experiment, researchers at Yale-New Haven Children’s Hospital focused on newborns who had been exposed in the womb
to methadone, putting them in low-stimulation rooms with parents sleeping in the hospital while caring for their newborns.
“Mom is a powerful treatment,” said Dr. Matthew Grossman, a pediatric hospitalist at Yale-New
Haven Children’s Hospital who has studied the care of opioid-dependent babies.
After a few days of observation, Jay’la Cy’anne was transferred by ambulance from Baptist Health
Richmond to the University of Kentucky Children’s Hospital, 25 miles away, for treatment.
The strategy is called “rooming-in.” In a recent experiment at Children’s Hospital at Dartmouth-Hitchcock in Lebanon, N. H., for example, mothers
and opioid-dependent newborns stayed together in the hospital, but outside the bustling NICU.
Rooming-in reduced the length of stay for morphine-treated infants to 12 days from nearly 17,
and the average hospital costs per infant to $9,000 from roughly $20,000, according to a study published last year in the journal Pediatrics.
