Neonatal Transport Team

The University of Massachusetts (UMASS) Memorial Campus Neonatal Intensive Care Unit is the regional perinatal center for all of Central Massachusetts. Our neonatal transport team provides services to community hospitals in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Rhode Island. We are an exclusively ground-based transport team and on average transport more than 100 infants each year. All transports are staffed by a provider (NICU fellow/Neonatal Nurse Practitioner), neonatal nurse and respiratory therapist.

The Neonatal Transport team has the specialized expertise and equipment to care for and transport all newborns with diverse diseases and diagnoses. Complex care is initiated by the transport team prior to arrival at the referring hospital and continued throughout the transport. Our mission includes

• Providing safe and timely critical-care expertise to neonatal patients.
• Promoting continuous, improving, evidenced-based innovative care to optimize patient outcomes.
• Providing evidenced-based education to our community and region through outreach.

Experience with neonatal transports is an essential part of the neonatal fellowship at UMASS. Whenever fellows are on service or on call in the NICU they are expected to be the provider on the transport. They will develop skills evaluating critical patients, reviewing charts, labs, and x-rays, performing diagnostic or treatment procedures, defining and guiding treatment plans, as well as communicating with the families and referring physicians. As fellows advance in their training they will be expected to take a leadership role in leading transport calls and will facilitate transports and admissions to the NICU.

By the end of their fellowship, our trainees will have the knowledge and skills required to appropriately intake transport referral calls, provide medical management of transports via phone and telemedicine and develop a solid foundation of transport physiology.

With improvements in technology and need for improved communication, the UMASS NICU (in addition to phone transport calls) are currently using telemedicine to guide critical resuscitations of acute infants at our community hospitals. NICU fellows at UMASS will have a firsthand opportunity to learn to lead these resuscitations and consults as they become familiar with the pathophysiology of neonates as well as the telemedicine technology.  Please click on the link below for a simulation our transport team performed to demonstrate how telemedicine can be used to help guide a resuscitation of a critical infant at a community hospital.