Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford, part of US-based Stanford Medicine Children’s Health, has opened the newly renovated Axe and Blaise Wanstrath neonatal intensive care unit (NICU).

The unit, located within the Johnson Center for Pregnancy and Newborn Services in Palo Alto, California, is now equipped with 16 beds, including 14 new rooms designed to support recovery and development.

Packard Children's delivers maternity care, integrating obstetric, neonatal, and developmental medicine services.

The new unit's private and semiprivate rooms, offering beds to accommodate newborn twins, are already available for families looking for a quiet setting.

Stanford Medicine Children’s Health neonatal and developmental medicine division chief Lawrence Prince said: “These new rooms are designed to offer a serene, nurturing atmosphere for newborns and their mothers, especially for our littlest newborns, who need a different kind of protective care than babies who are just a few weeks older.

“The updated unit has adapted our protocols to meet these fragile babies’ unique medical and developmental needs and support their families at every step of their health care journey.”

The hospital has also expanded its capacity to care for critically ill newborns.

The NICU now provides emergent surgery, dialysis for kidney failure, and extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) for babies with heart or lung complications.

Prince added: “For newborns with critical illness, ECMO is often the therapy of last resort and is often lifesaving.

“The new rooms allow babies to recover peacefully with their families beside them, minimising the stress of shared spaces.”

In addition to the NICU upgrades, Packard Children's has inaugurated a new Infant Nutrition Lab. Operated by infant feeding technicians and managed by Clinical Food Services, the lab unifies the storage and preparation of human milk.

The hospital's next phase of renovations will revamp the remaining NICU units with shared rooms for patients.

By mid-2025, the hospital aims to launch an antepartum unit, a new maternity unit, and the Bass Center for Childhood Cancer and Blood Diseases.