Newborns at Excela Westmoreland Hospital in Pennsylvania are already benefitting from the Family Additions Maternity Center’s recent acquisition of two bubble CPAP devices.

An article by TribLive reports on the successful bubble CPAP intervention for Ayla Wirth, a premature infant born five weeks early who developed respiratory distress. Clinicians lauded the technology for providing support to newborns who otherwise may have been invasively ventilated or transferred to a specialty children’s hospital.

The maternity center’s two new bubble CPAP devices are a “game-changer,” said Diane Shope, respiratory care supervisor at Excela Westmoreland. “We’re ecstatic that we can offer this. We’ll be able to keep babies in the community, so they can be with their families and they don’t need to travel to [UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh].”

Shope explained: When a baby is born prematurely, their lungs aren’t developed as well they would be for a full-term baby. With the CPAP device, she said, Ayla’s “breathing settled down within 10 to 15 minutes, and then her oxygen level went up, her heart rate came down, and it was just a ‘go’ from there.”

Read more at www.triblive.com