In neonatal intensive care units (NICUs), blood sampling, including arterial blood gas (ABG) tests and capillary blood tests (commonly known as a ‘heel stick’), plays an important role in patient monitoring. These tests help care teams monitor a variety of parameters, including blood pH levels and concentrations of vital gases like carbon dioxide (CO2) and oxygen (O2).

Chronic hypercapnia, characterized by elevated levels of CO2, poses a significant challenge for individuals with conditions like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), neuromuscular disorders (NMD), and obesity. Although the negative effects of chronic hypercapnia are widely acknowledged, researchers at the University of Michigan are shedding light on the true urgency of its management.

How can NICU teams ensure that all of these priorities are adequately managed? Here, we’ll take a deeper look at NICU ventilation, the challenges that clinicians face, and strategies that can help.

Every aspect of neonatal care matters, from the sounds infants hear to their exposure to light. Kangaroo care, also known as kangaroo mother care or skin-to-skin contact, is a method of holding a newborn baby on the bare chest of the mother or father, with their skin in direct contact.

This whitepaper discusses three pediatric patient populations that are difficult to manage on mechanical ventilation and how continuous monitoring of CO2 can serve as a powerful tool to support noninvasive ventilation (NIV) strategies and therapies in the PICU.

We may not typically consider blood draws and heel sticks to be a large driver of patients losing blood, but the issue carries greater significance with neonatal patients, who don’t have much blood to give in the first place.

There is a long list of decisions to make when adopting new technology in a hospital unit, and transcutaneous monitoring is no exception. Some of the most overlooked decisions in our experience are those around mounting and storing the devices both during monitoring, while not in use, as well as for performing maintenance.

To manage the CO2, the main tool is your ventilation strategy. However, freely increasing the rate, volume, and pressure without careful consideration presents its own set of issues. The ventilation that is important to keep CO2 in a safe range for brain protection is the same ventilation that could damage the lungs.

This animation offers [...]