Nurse Roxana Gonzalez gently straightens a yellow crochet baby blanket, smoothing its lace-trimmed corners over an incubator. A tiny baby slumbers inside as classical music tinkles in the background. A continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) machine softly bubbles away, helping the baby breathe.
It's midnight, and inside the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) at UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital Oakland, Gonzalez and the other nurses are warming breast milk and formula for the night's first feed. The hospital is home to the East Bay's only level IV NICU, meaning it has the sophisticated equipment and highly trained staff to care for the sickest of newborns when other facilities cannot. Only two other level IV NICUs serve the Bay Area, one at UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital San Francisco and one at Stanford's Lucille Packard Children's Hospital in Palo Alto.
About 400 infants are treated in Oakland's NICU each year. Many are born preterm with underdeveloped hearts and lungs, need surgical care, or are at risk of serious brain damage after difficult births. The hospital's highly specialized care draws seriously ill babies from as far away as Eureka, Reno and Modesto, where UCSF Benioff NICU doctors conduct outreach to improve medical care in the underserved Central Valley. A neonatologist is on call 24 hours a day to travel to other hospitals in cities like Castro Valley, Martinez and San Ramon to stabilize critically ill infants and, when needed, refer them here.
"Other hospitals refer to us when they don't have the unique equipment or the full team of specialists, or when they just can't find the right diagnosis and need help," says medical director and neonatologist Dr. Arthur D'Harlingue, who works alongside specialists like pediatric cardiologists, neurologists and geneticists to meet each child's specific needs.
Most babies treated at UCSF Benioff Oakland live in underserved communities and are on government insurance. To make sure the hospital will continue to be a safety net for East Bay and California families – and provide world-class care – UCSF Health is investing $1.5 billion to modernize it, including NICU upgrades.
"The new hospital project is our covenant with the community to take care of all kids, regardless of their socioeconomic level," UCSF Benioff Children's Hospitals president Dr. Nicholas Holmes said recently. "UCSF Health is committed to creating the region's most comprehensive care network for kids, and UCSF Benioff Oakland is an integral piece of this vision."
