TAMWORTH hospital’s Newborn and Paediatric Emergency Transport Services (NETS) is celebrating a new arrival.
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Last Saturday the service received a Good Egg resuscitation pack funded by the Humpty Dumpty Foundation.
The pack – for newborn babies and infants under 10kg – contains a number of items, including an oximeter, which measures the saturation of a patient’s haemoglobin, and a Neopuff, which delivers consistent positive and expiratory pressure, to improve a baby’s lung volume.
Tamworth children’s ward nursing unit manager Terese Madden said the Good Egg was a relatively new device and its benefits to the hospital would be huge.
“It’s a new innovation by NETS and really fills a gap in the equipment that was used to help in the retrieval of newborns and infants from outlying hospitals,” she said.
“Before the device was donated and there was a neonatal retrieval, the team sent to pick up the newborn had to take a paediatrician pack and try and add neonatal equipment to it. This is a more specialised device that includes almost everything that would be need to support such a new little person during transportation to a bigger hospital.”
Effectively, the device can resuscitate a baby during the time it takes to move it from a small rural hospital to another hospital where there is a neonatal nursery.
Mrs Madden said the benefits from such a device were almost indescribable.
“Before this, there really was nothing else that you could literally pick up and run with to retrieval,” she said.
The Humpty Dumpty Foundation was developed in 1996 to help purchase life-saving medical equipment for neonatal units and paediatric wards in hospitals and health service centres across Australia.
Funds are raised through corporate donations and fundraising functions.
In the past the foundation has donated a specialised resuscitation table for children to the Tamworth hospital emergency ward.