The newest neonatal intensive care unit in North Texas recently opened at Cook Children’s Medical Center in Prosper, increasing access to care in the growing region.
Cook Children's officially started seeing NICU patients this week.
Sheralyn Hartline, the vice president of Nursing and Patient Care at the Prosper medical center, said the decision to expand services in Prosper was in response to the area’s growing population and higher demand for care closer to home.
“Life happens outside the hospital,” Hartline said. “You have other children. You have to get back to work. It's a particularly rough stressor for families to have to make that commute.”
Hartline said the unit has nine single bedrooms, with another room designed for twins. It’s the first NICU in the Prosper area to be housed in a children’s hospital.
“It is pediatric docs taking care of pediatric illness,” Hartline said. “They're not just little adults.”
The staff, including nurses and clinical teams, are trained in pediatric medicine. Cook Children’s Medical Center-Prosper has dozens of subspecialists with pediatric training.
Hartline said this means newborns in the NICU can receive a wide range of care without the stress of transferring and commuting almost an hour away to Dallas or Fort Worth. If a newborn needs care beyond what the center in Prosper can provide, the location has set up telehealth capabilities and patients can be quickly transferred to Cook Children’s higher level NICU in Fort Worth.
The Prosper location began operating in 2019 with urgent and primary care clinics, and the hospital tower opened less than three years ago. Hartline said in that time the hospital went from about 25 beds to almost 70.
The hospital has served more than 320,000 children since it opened. Hartline said the NICU will help increase the number of children Cook Children's in Prosper can provide with critical care.
Abigail Ruhman is KERA’s health reporter. Got a tip? Email Abigail at aruhman@kera.org.
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