Nurses in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) at Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg, Florida, provide advanced, specialized care to our tiniest patients and their families. Our nurses often become involved moments after delivery through our “Stork Team,” which assesses the newborn and then transports the baby from the delivery room to the NICU.

Nurses gain experience with a variety of complex conditions and premature infants at the edge of viability through patients referred to Johns Hopkins All Children’s, where the NICU carries the highest available ranking, Level IV. We care for more than 100 very low (3 pounds, 5 ounces or less) and extremely low birth weight (less than 2 pounds, 3 ounces) babies each year.

Families often spend days, weeks or months in our NICU, bonding with their nurses along the way.

Specialized Training and Care

The Magnet®-designated nursing team at Johns Hopkins All Children’s is committed to compassionate and safe care, collaborative practice and a culture of curiosity and innovation. Magnet®-designated refers to the highest recognition a hospital can receive for nursing excellence and high-quality patient care, from the American Nurses Credentialing Center.

The clinical nurse leader in the Johns Hopkins All Children’s Maternal, Fetal & Neonatal Institute implements and oversees quality improvement projects that raise the level of patient care and outcomes. Other nursing leaders in the NICU include RN Clinical Managers, RN Clinical Supervisors and Clinical Team Leaders that support Nursing and the daily operations of the unit and patient needs. 

Our NICU nurses generally have special certifications in at least one of these areas:

• Critical care
• Neonatal intensive care
• Breastfeeding

We also have dedicated nursing educators in the NICU who provide onboarding and training on our standards of care and continuing education on the latest and best practices.

Because of the specialized skills of our nurses, they perform duties at the top of their scope of practice. For instance, they provide vascular access nursing to neonates throughout our 259-bed teaching hospital 24 hours a day, inserting and maintaining peripherally inserted central catheters (PICCs) and other access. Our hospital is able to provide timely and efficient care for vascular access needs with our RN neonatal vascular access team.

While infants are in our NICU, our RN neonatal developmental care specialist collaborates with the family and the care team to monitor how the baby is progressing toward developmental milestones, such as developmentally appropriate sensory stimulation, including light (light cycling), early mobility and skin-to-skin contact (kangaroo care).

The NICU also has a dedicated nursing discharge coordinator to provide support and instructions to our complex patients to have a successful transition to home.

Follow-up Care

Many NICU babies need care or support after discharge. Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital offers a variety of resources, including nurse coordinators for specialized Newborn Follow-up Clinics dedicated to:

• Neonatal abstinence syndrome for babies exposed to addictive drugs or medications in the womb
• Neurologic conditions, such as hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy (HIE), intraventricular hemorrhage (IVH) or intracranial hemorrhage (ICH)
• Extremely low or very low birth weight

These nurse coordinators collaborate with our social work team to give families support in the continuing care of their child.