Parents sleeping cot side on the NNU

Every hospital department has specific requirements and priorities. At KwickScreen, we pride ourselves on being able to offer a range of solutions to best fulfil our customers’ needs. We recently worked with Leeds Children’s Hospital to install some printed screens in their neonatal unit. Read on to find out more about the project.

Background

Sufficient accommodation is the most important facility to keep parents with their baby. Due to the distances between home and hospital, parents not staying the night will often need to cut their visits short because they have long and tiring journeys back home.

The hospital often have parents who wish to spend the night cot side with their infant on the NNU. An idea emerged regarding purchasing foldable beds and allowing parents to sleep cot side in an area of the NNU with enough space capacity to facilitate foldable beds.

Implementation

A bid to Leeds Hospitals Charities was made to purchase foldable Z beds and retractable screens. The hospital also bid for improvements to be made to their existing parents shower and toilet area.

Our retractable screens allow each cot space privacy for sleeping and also had the added benefit of providing privacy & dignity to patients during breast feeding, expressing and intimate procedures such as Rectal Washouts and Catheterisation.

Conclusion

Although initial reservations were met due to the change in practice by staff, once they fully understood the importance of offering choice to parents then they embraced the change.

The screens offer greater choice and opportunity for parents to stay with their infant. They also allow the hospital to maximise their space, freeing up their other 2 parental accommodations to allow more parents to stay close to their infants.

The trust has received plenty of positive feedback from parents who have stayed on the unit, especially from the breastfeeding mothers and those who are transferred form DGHs in the middle of the night for urgent treatment. 

We also recently received some lovely feedback from Chris Gallahan, whose son had been treated at the Inova Alexandria Hospital in Virginia. The turtle print, used for our screens shown above, had a particularly powerful effect on his experience whilst his son was being treated:

"My son was in the NICU (neonatal intensive care unit) at Inova Alexandria Hospital when he was born. They had some of your privacy screens and we spent a lot of time sitting behind the one with the sea turtle swimming in the blue water. It may not seem like much but the picture was able to bring some joy into our life during a dark time."

Chris Gallahan, Patient at Inova Alexandria Hospital