Clinical Activities
Our clinical goal is to provide outstanding care to all ill newborns in the Finger Lakes Region. The NICU at Golisano Children's Hospital at Strong is a level IV facility that can treat all neonatal medical and surgical illnesses. Our 60 bed NICU has extensive technical capabilities, including ECMO, inhaled NO, and HFOV.
Our 15 board-certified/eligible neonatologists treat 1200 admissions yearly in the NICU. These patients had the full range of medical, surgical and cardiac disorders. Seventy-five percent of our admissions come from the high risk perinatology services at Strong Memorial Hospital, which has 2800 deliveries annually. Twenty-five percent of our patients were born at either community hospitals or at other regional hospitals, were transferred to our NICU for advanced care. Our neonatal transport service transferred patients from 19 referring hospitals. Approximately 1 in 12 newborns in our region was treated in the NICU at Golisano Children's Hospital at Strong.
Our very busy NICU is the site for training pediatric and internal medicine-pediatric house officers, postdoctoral fellows, medical students and neonatal nurse practitioners. The Division of Neonatology also supervises the newborn nursery at Strong Memorial Hospital. Three board-certified pediatricians establish policy and procedures and care for normal newborns.
At Rochester General Hospital, the Division of Neonatology cared for patients in the 12 bed Level II SCN. As a community hospital, the RGH SCN is an important training site for pediatric and family medicine residents and medical students. Members of the Division of Neonatology are medical directors for the nurseries at RGH, Highland Hospital and Unity Hospital and are responsible for establishing consistent policy and procedures for local hospitals. We alsoo have an active outreach teaching program for our community hospitals.
To provide outstanding medical care, it is essential to follow the neurodevelopmental outcome of our NICU graduates. The Infant Toddler Development Program (ITDP)follows all patients who are discharged from the NICU, either in the ITDP or in the Neonatal Tracking Program. In the ITDP, patients are evaluated by a pediatric neurologist, developmental psychologist, social worker, neonatal nurse practitioner and neonatologist. The ITDP also evaluates patients who were not in the NICU, but are referred for evaluation. The Neonatal Tracking Program follows all NICU graduates to age 10 years by periodic questionnaires sent to the patient’s family and pediatrician. The tracking forms are reviewed by the ITDP team to identify patients who may need formal evaluation and to obtain long-term follow-up data. To date, over 26,000 patients have been followed by the tracking program.
Integral to the Division of Neonatology's clinical activities are outreach visits to the 17 referring hospitals in the Finger Lakes Region. The goals of these visits are to review maternal and neonatal outcomes at the referring hospitals, provide feedback on patients transferred to the GCH@S NICU; review clinical policies and procedures; and provide outreach education. In addition, the outreach team compares outcome statistics from the referring hospital to region-wide data. Each hospital is visited 1-2 times per year by a neonatologist, high risk perinatologist, neonatal nurse practitioner and obstetrical nurse practitioner.