Experience with an Obstetrical and Neonatal Intensive Care Unit

The variation in the neonatal mortality rate from 39.6/1,000 to 16.43/1,000 live births in a series of 913 high-risk pregnancy cases manged in a Regional Obstetrical Neonatal Intensive Care Unit over the past 5 years has been dependent on a man, not a machine. The presence of a trained full-time director of the obstetric part of the team was an unexpected variable which seems significant. A follow-up of 300 survivors at 3 years of age with the Denver development screening test (DDST) and the Stanford-Binet test (S-B) has been completed. Intensive antenatal and immediate postnatal care by an obstetric-pediatric team reduced the sequela of physical or mental retardation to 3 per cent (DDST) and 11.6 per cent (S-B).