Caring for the Opioid Epidemic’s Youngest Victims

Before hospitals in the rest of the country started seeing a surge in the number of infants born with severe drug withdrawal symptoms, this town of 50,000 was already facing a crisis. In 2010, babies born to mothers using heroin were filling up so many beds in the newborn intensive care unit at the city’s main hospital that little space was left for babies with other life-threatening conditions.  The nurses who cared for these agitated and often inconsolable infants knew there was a better and less costly way to help newborns through the painful, weekslong process of drug withdrawal By 2012, they had created a separate newborn therapy unit just for babies in withdrawal. Because their treatment didn’t require the same high-tech equipment needed in an intensive care unit, it was about half the cost of neonatal intensive care, according to Dr. Sean Loudin, who heads the new unit at Cabell Huntington Hospital. The next step was to create an infant recovery center outside the hospital where newborns could be taken as soon as it was safe to leave the hospital, usually within two weeks. Not only would it free up beds for other newborns who need intensive care, it would be tailored to the needs of infants in drug withdrawal, and their parents.