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