Can and should level II nurseries care for newborns who require mechanical ventilation?

Perinatal regionalization was conceived roughly 25 years ago to provide centralized care for critically ill newborn infants. As for many 25-year-old concepts, the obligatory centripetal design of many regionalization policies may need to be modified. This article presents the outcomes of 408 surviving patients who required mechanical ventilation (136 born in one community hospital and 272 birthweight-matched infants born in our tertiary center), and were cared for in our perinatal network. Mechanical ventilation of a resident population of newborns at a community NICU appeared to be as effective as ventilatory care at a regionalized tertiary neonatal intensive care unit, when assessed by comparing birthweight-matched populations for length of hospital stay, days on ventilator, and the need for home O2. Some may still claim that every baby who requires mechanical ventilation must be transferred to a tertiary care center. In an era of heightened interest in health services, health outcomes, and cost-effectiveness analysis, however, the authors believe that such claims will be subjected to increasing scrutiny. Our study represents a first attempt at determining the shape such scrutiny might take, and the sort of data analyses that may be required to reformat a perinatal network.