Mothers in the Cy-Fair area now have closer access to a higher level of care for their newly born babies.

On Sept. 14, the neonatal intensive care unit—or NICU—at the Cy-Fair Medical Center Hospital was officially recognized by the state of Texas as a Level III facility. Through a surveying process that began last October, hospital officials spent the past year demonstrating to the American Academy of Pediatrics that they were qualified to upgrade from a Level II to a Level III facility, Chief Nursing Officer TaShauna McCray said.

NICUs provide specialized care for premature and critically ill babies to help with a range of issues, including respiratory issues, low blood sugar and infections that can spread from the mother to the infant, McCray said.

“Every baby is different, and their struggles are totally different,” she said.

The new designation reflects a greater complexity in the services the hospital can provide, McCray said. A Level III facility also takes patients as young as 23 weeks old, whereas Level II facilities take patients as young as 32 weeks old, she said.

Zoe Moses, the hospital’s director of Women’s Services, said the facility has also refined its methods for determining when babies are ready to be breast or bottle fed. As a result, infants have been growing faster and getting discharged sooner, according to an internal analysis conducted during the surveying process.

“[Feeding] is based on size of the baby,” Moses said. “If they show us they are ready to take a bottle or be breast fed, that’s when we actually feed them. It’s basically led by the baby, and they typically do better when they start feeding on their own than when they are encouraged to start feeding.”

McCray said a future goal is to offer extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, which she described as a type of life support for the smaller infants.

In addition to improving its services, the hospital also brought on new staff for the NICU, including a program manager, an educator, a lactation consultant and a team of nutritionists, McCray said.

“It’s been an exciting journey for us,” she said. “We had to implement a robust quality program where members of a multi-disciplinary team—nursing staff, leadership, administration, physicians, housekeeping, case management—all came together to look at what we needed to implement to help us provide even better care for this population of patients.”

The NICU at the Cy-Fair Medical Center can handle 25 babies at once, McCray said. Before the upgrade, the next closest hospitals with Level III NICUs were in the Memorial Hermann Katy Hospital, the Memorial Hermann Memorial City Medical Center and the Kingwood Medical Center.

“It would be difficult for families to drive in traffic to get to some of these other [Level III facilities] outside the northwest quadrant to transfer back and forth for visits, feedings [and] meeting with different members of the care team,” McCray said. “This is just a lot easier for them to be able to transport into our facility.”

Hospital officials said they are looking into the possibility of eventually improving to Level IV, which would entail providing services to children younger than 23 weeks old. The only Houston area hospitals with Level IV NICUs are all in the Texas Medical Center—the Memorial Hermann Hospital, Texas Children’s Hospital and The Women’s Hospital of Texas.

McCray said the hospital’s CEO Naman Mahajan, as well as the previous CEO Terry Wheeler, both pushed for improving neonatal capabilities. The nursing team also played a major role, Moses said.

“A lot of things we implemented for the NICU designation were implemented by our team of nurses,” she said. “It didn’t just happen from the top, it happened from the bedside.”

Correction: This story has been updated to reflect that extracorporeal membrane oxygenation is a future goal and not a current offering at the hospital.