Las St4 in Neonates

The level 3 Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at the Royal Stoke University Hospital is a lead centre and regional NICU within the Staffordshire, Shropshire and Black Country Newborn Network. The birth population is 7000 deliveries per year. The Neonatal Intensive Care Unit is a purpose built modern unit, which opened in 2009, providing 6 intensive care, 6 high dependency and 14 special care cots. In 2016 we opened a Transitional Care Unit, which has expanded to 10 cots in January 2019.
We have 600 NICU admissions and 630 TCU admissions each year, including tertiary referrals from other neonatal units within and outside our newborn network. The unit has facilities for conventional and volume targeted ventilation, HFOV, inhaled nitric oxide, cranial ultrasonography, echocardiography and therapeutic hypothermia. There are facilities for MRI and EEG in ventilated babies and weekday neonatal surgeons on site. The NICU has been awarded a Care Excellence Platinum Award by the trust and has won the Best Training Unit Award in the West Midlands region in 2023 The Neonatal consultant team consists of 9 consultants who all have an area of specialist interest or responsibility.
The consultants operate a 2 consultant-of-the-week on-service model and a 1 in 9 on-call rota. The on-site training opportunities will be the same as that provided to postgraduate doctors in training (PGDiTs), who are currently on training rotations within the West Midlands School of Paediatrics. The department benefits from an ongoing departmental teaching program with many consultant delivered teaching sessions, and opportunities to participate in the departmental clinical audit and quality improvement activities