Neonatal Transport Services

The UConn Health Center Fire Department has maintained a long partnership with the UConn Health Center’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) to provide the greater New England area with specialized care and transports for neonatal infants. This program was founded in 1975 as one of the first of its kind. A neonate is described as an infant between birth and one month, however the transport service provides care to children requiring comprehensive evaluation and treatment, mostly premature babies.

The UConn Neonatal Intensive Care Unit is one of the premier treatment facilities in the area, serving as a tertiary care referral center for area hospitals. When a hospital determines that they have an infant which they requires a higher level of medical care, the attending physician contacts a UConn neonatal physician and describes the need for further care. A decision can then be made to activate the transport team. The team consists of a specially trained neonatal physician or advanced practice registered nurse (APRN), a neonatal nurse, a respiratory therapist and a firefighter/driver. The job of the transport team is to respond to the requesting hospital and stabilize the neonate for transport. This process is usually very involved, utilizing numerous advanced assessments and skills and can take hours depending on the acuity of the infant. After the baby is stabilized, the transport team then takes the infant in a specially designed stretcher or “isolette” to a hospital better equipped to handle acutely ill infants, frequently UConn’s NICU.

The UConn Health Center Fire Department’s role in the team is to provide for the safe and efficient physical transport of the neonate. The department’s program is supervised by Chief Bill Perkins and Neonatal Transport Manager Captain Greg Priest. The transport vehicles are configured so that in the case of transporting twin infants, two isolettes can be loaded at one time, one in the normal rear area and another through the side door. This provides for greater efficiency and flexibility of the transport team.

The isolette system used by the team consists of several different styles of stretchers. The first being a “non-acute” isolette. This particular stretcher is used for infants not requiring many external medical devices, such as IV pumps or invasive blood pressure monitoring, and is utilized primarily for taking infants who have been stabilized back to local hospitals following a NICU stay. The second type of stretcher is a Ferno acute stretcher.

The Neonatal Transport Team is on call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The fire department ensures that one firefighter is always assigned to the neonatal ambulance and attempts to keep that firefighter available whenever possible to ensure that the transport team is ready at any time.

Statistically, the Neonatal Transport program performed 356 transports in the June 2006-July 2007 fiscal year. The chart to the right shows the call volume in relation to past fiscal years.

The success of the UConn Health Center Fire Department’s Neonatal Transport program is due to the mutual cooperation of firefighters, NICU staff, respiratory therapists, clinical engineers and hospital administration. Anyone with questions or comments regarding this program can contact the Fire Department’s Neonatal Transport Manager, Captain Greg Priest at priest@uchc.edu or 860-679-4291.