UCSF celebrates 40 years of "Miracle Babies" on October 23
WHEN: 11:00 am to 3:00 pm Saturday, October 23
WHERE: Saunders Court, UCSF, 513 Parnassus Avenue—follow signs from the lobby.
WHAT: 40th Anniversary of UCSF Children’s Hospital’s Neonatal Intensive Care Nursery - one of the nation’s first NICUs.
WHO: Nurses, doctors and staff reunite with the babies whose lives they saved and the parents who spent the first part of their children’s lives at their bedsides in the high-tech world of intensive care.
## Media are Invited to Cover:
* Halloween theme party with children in costume, face-painting, bounce house, petting zoo, reunions everywhere.
## By Arrangement (call Janet Basu at 476-2557 or page 719-0189)
* Interviews with parents and children and pioneers of neonatal intensive care for stories of how babies’ lives were saved with techniques that now are standard—and how UCSF’s intensive care nursery meets today’s challenges for the most high-risk infants.
Among those stories: The first infants saved by CPAP, a UCSF-discovered breathing device that saves preemies with immature lungs. Babies saved by surgery soon after birth. Mothers and babies whose first surgery took place before the infant was born, thanks to UCSF’s pioneering Fetal Treatment Center. Newborns saved by surfactant, a UCSF doctor’s discovery that reduced infant deaths by 50 percent.
* A tour of today’s 50-bed Intensive Care Nursery.
The Intensive Care Nursery at UCSF Children’s Hospital celebrates its 40th anniversary on Saturday, October 23 with a party that reunites parents and children with the nurses, doctors and staff who cared for them when the newborns’ lives were at stake. This year’s reunion also celebrates the reminiscences of families and staff throughout the years.
When UCSF’s Intensive Care Nursery (ICN) was founded in 1964, 40,000 premature babies died each year from a lung disorder that doctors had just begun to understand. At UCSF and a handful of centers elsewhere, doctors and nurses were just discovering the methods that now save the lives of tens of thousands of newborn babies in intensive care nurseries around the world.
In 2004, the ICN at UCSF is one of the region’s top neonatal referral centers, currently treating more than 1,000 high-risk newborns each year. Its staff continues to set the standards for care of the most fragile premature infants. UCSF is the pioneer in fetal surgery and a national leader in care for babies who need surgery or other major treatments in the first hours, weeks or months after birth.