The care of critically ill premature and newborn babies requires highly specialised equipment tailored to ‘small sizes’. The Baby Ambulance with its new transport incubator is equipped for this.
The transport incubator at the Kinderspital Zurich makes it possible to bring highly specialised intensive care medicine to critically ill premature and newborn babies on site. It turns the Baby Ambulance into a mobile intensive care unit. Patients are transported from maternity clinics and smaller hospitals to the children's hospital in the baby ambulance in the transport incubator and provided with life-saving measures on the way.
The transport incubator can do everything that highly specialised neonatology can offer. It provides critically ill premature and newborn babies with warmth and humidity during the journey. It ensures complete cardiovascular monitoring. It has several electronically controlled infusion pumps to provide the small patients with continuous infusions of vital medication. In the event of respiratory failure, the transport incubator's ventilator can take over the ventilation and oxygen supply of a newborn. This is extremely delicate, especially in a mobile baby ambulance and with a particularly small premature baby. It is crucial that state-of-the-art ventilators are used so that the lungs of critically ill newborns are not damaged. The Baby Ambulance at the Children's Hospital Zurich is called out around 250 times a year.
With the move to the new Kinderspital at Lengg, the baby ambulance with the new transport incubator is part of a team of over 20 ambulances. The new transport incubator will ensure that critically ill newborns are transported safely and receive optimal care en route on the day of the move, 2 November 2024, and for many years to come.
Stiftung Chance financed the state-of-the-art baby ambulance in 2014, which has been part of Zurich's cityscape ever since. It advanced the funds for the new transport incubator in summer 2024.
Now we need your donation to finance this necessary, major investment. Thank you very much!