Okinawa Naval hospital unit has Air Force ties

  • Published
  • By Staff Sgt. Kenya Shiloh
  • 18th Wing Public Affairs
CAMP LESTER, Okinawa --  Members of the U.S. Naval Hospital Okinawa Neonatal Intensive Care Unit located on Camp Lester are people you trust with your most valuable treasure -- your baby.

The NICU is the closest neonatal intensive care unit in the Western Pacific that offers state-of-the-art neonatal care to all infants in the region.

"We are the transport team for all of the Western Pacific," said Maj. Paula Maloney, the NICU flight commander. "We transport babies who need care from Korea east to Hawaii or to the United States."

These professionals also go on humanitarian missions including three from Saipan to Tripler Army Medical Center, Hawaii.

"When we go on transport missions, we have a neonatologist, a nurse and a medical technician," Major Maloney said. "That puts them out of our work environment. Last year, we had a three- to four-person team go out on an average of one transport per week."

What's unique about the unit is they are an 18th Medical Operations Squadron flight attached to a Navy asset.

The flight has four neonatologists, 17 nurses and 11 medical technicians on the staff to care for premature babies and full-term babies who are sick when they are born. They can care for 14 babies at a time, but can take more if necessary.

"Our bed capacity is 14, but in the last week, we've had 17," Major Maloney said. "We recently had five sets of twins."

The neonatologist is the physician for the babies. They perform specialty care while the nurses help take care of the babies. The nurses go through a six-month course to get certified in premature care, but it takes a year to get used to taking care of the babies.

The medical technicians assist the nurses by checking vital signs regularly, cleaing the babies, drawing blood and starting IVs. However their biggest job other than caring for the infants is educating the parents on their child's care.

"The most gratifying part of our job is taking care of the infants," Major Maloney said. "The babies are not the only patients; the families are our patients as well. We have to look at the big picture and we incorporate not only the babies, but also the parents. It's a whole system. We can't do it without the parents because they are taking the babies home. We have to educate the parents, take care of them and give them the tools so they can take care of the babies when they get home."

She said they offer the parents 24/7 access to the babies and the physicians work closely with the parents on the care of their newborns.

"This job can be difficult sometimes, especially when trying to stay strong for the parents who are upset because their children are sick," said Staff Sgt. Felita Ballard, a NICU medical technician. "We form such a strong bond with the babies and the families that it's sometimes hard to let go."

The staff also provides consultations to pediatricians from other hospitals and clinics as well as traveling to numerous facilities throughout the Pacific to train their staff on how to care for the babies and get them ready for transport.

When a NICU team gets called to go on a mission, they work with a multitude of units throughout the wing.

"We work with the Aeromedical Staging Facility and the 18th Aeromedical Evacuation Squadron," Major Maloney said. "We meet as a group to discuss any issues to improve care. The whole purpose is to make sure these missions go off without a hitch. We definitely have challenges just because of location and availability of aircraft. It's definitely a team effort."

Quite often the NICU team works closely with the aerovac office to get tickets for a return flight after completing their missions. Major Maloney said the team can't always get back on the same transport aircraft because it may get diverted to another location.

"That aircraft can end up being diverted to Guam, so we have to get the NICU team back as fast as possible in order to work on another mission," she said.

The major said the length of the missions vary. One mission can be as short as four-to-five hours or as long as 17 depending on where the patient needs to be transported.

"That's a lot of patient care time," she said. "We start from the time we take care of the babies here, to when we put them in an ambulance and transfer them to the aircraft."

To transport patients the team uses transport "isolates," which are self-contained systems that have built-in ventilators, cardiac monitors, IV pumps -- everything that's needed to monitor the baby.

"It's basically a warm box for the baby that is environmentally controlled in case the aircraft is too hot or too cold," Major Maloney said. "They also carry kits which are mini-hospitals in a bag in the event they need supplies for the infants."

Back home, the staff works with post-partum, labor and delivery, the blood bank, laboratory, radiology, respiratory therapy agencies and Navy staff on a daily basis.

"We have a lot of support from the 18th Medical Group and of course the Navy, because we're imbedded with them," Major Maloney said. "We are an Air Force unit in a Navy hospital. How unique is that? We work hand-in-hand with the Navy on a daily basis. We even do uniform inspections with them. We're definitely a joint service."