Pavilion for Women, Kangaroo Crew collaborate on first Maternal Transport

January 23, 2018

Texas Children’s continues to deliver on its mission of providing quality and safe care to our patients. As part of the expansion of the Maternal Fetal Medicine services at the Pavilion for Women, the obstetrics service has partnered with the Texas Children’s Kangaroo Crew to create the Maternal Transport Service.

The Kangaroo Crew transport team has decades of experience in critical care transport. To ensure expertise in high risk obstetrics care, the Kangaroo Crew and the Pavilion for Women labor and delivery (L&D) nursing staff have combined their specialized experience to create a program that supports critically ill obstetrics and gynecology patients. The team consisting of a Kangaroo Crew nurse, L&D nurse, respiratory therapist and EMT can provide specialty care not only to newborns and children, but now to mothers while enroute to the Pavilion for Women.

On December 8, 2017, Texas Children’s had its first maternal fetal transport case where a high-risk pregnant patient was transported to the Pavilion for Women from an outside hospital. The transfer call came in to Texas Children’s Mission Control, the hospital’s state-of-the-art communications hub that houses representatives from the departments of Room Management, Transport Services and Critical Care.

When a transfer call comes into the center, teams across the system work together to assure an efficient transfer occurs that provides the highest quality and safest care possible for high risk maternal patients.

“Whenever safe to do so, transporting a pregnant patient to the appropriate facility before an emergency happens is safest,” said Dr. Karin Fox, medical director of Maternal Transport. ”There is not an incubator yet made that can support an unborn baby and the mother, provided she is stable and a true emergency has not yet occurred.”

Prior to the maternal transport, meticulous collaboration took place before coordinating the patient’s successful transfer to the Pavilion for Women.

“We collaborated with our Maternal-Fetal Medicine and subspecialist teams to determine if this patient would benefit from maternal transport,” said Elizabeth Bolds, assistant clinical director at the Pavilion for Women. ”Intake assessment revealed this would be an ideal candidate for our Maternal Transport program and as such we coordinated the patient’s transfer to the Pavilion for maternal ICU care.”

The Kangaroo Crew staff – Shannon Frost RN, Heidi Allen, RRT, Nathan Martinez, EMT, along with maternal transport nurse, Khanh Nguyen, comprised the pioneering team that transported our first maternal transport.

According to Deb D’Ambrosio, RN, director of Transport Services and Mission Control, and Dr. Jeanine Graf, medical director of the Kangaroo Crew, “we had six successful transports in the first few weeks of starting the program. We anticipated this would be the volume for one month.”

By extending this transfer service beyond the hospital’s pediatric and neonatal populations to our high-risk expecting mothers, the Pavilion for Women continues to bolster its reputation as a primary referral site for patients with high-risk pregnancies.

“When the Pavilion for Women opened five years ago, it was created to care for the most complicated pregnancies and critically ill newborns, as well as serve thousands of normal deliveries each year,” said Cris Daskevich, senior vice president at the Pavilion for Women. “By working with our Kangaroo Crew and Mission Control partners, this transport service allows us to help our partners in the community transport their really sick patients to us where we can improve outcomes for mothers and babies.”

Click here to learn more about high-risk pregnancy care at Texas Children’s Pavilion for Women. Click here to learn more about our Kangaroo Crew transport team.