LUTZ – St. Joseph’s Hospital-North in Lutz is building an eight-bed Neonatal Intensive Care Unit scheduled to open in summer 2025.
The NICU will provide specialized 24/7 care for babies born prematurely, underweight or with special health needs and requirements such as IVs, respiratory therapy or other therapies.
The Level II NICU will be staffed by neonatologists, neonatal nurse practitioners and neonatal nurses. The NICU will supplement St. Joseph’s Hospital-North’s existing labor and delivery and Mom and Baby maternity services.
Construction started in January on the $2 million, 5,431-square-foot NICU.
An innovative feature of the NICU will be two “couplet care” rooms where mothers and babies are cared for together. Normally, mothers and babies are separated when babies need to go to the NICU. The two couplet care rooms each measure 525 square feet.
“St. Joseph’s Hospital-North will be the first in the Tampa Bay area to have couplet rooms, and to the best of my knowledge, the first in the state of Florida,” said Charles Ennis, a BayCare patient services director overseeing several of the health system’s NICUs.
Ennis said staffing and building logistics are reasons why NICU couplet rooms are not common.
The other NICU rooms are private for one baby. The private NICU rooms, measuring 280 square feet each, include sleeping accommodations, a bathroom and shower for a parent or another loved one to stay overnight with the baby.
“We’ve seen nationally that birth rates are going down but the needs for NICU beds is increasing,” said Sara Dodds, St. Joseph’s Hospital-North president. “We know that some of that is due to women having babies later in life and women also dealing with more medical issues. We are giving local moms an option to deliver close to home with the availability of a NICU.”
Ennis said this NICU will help eliminate the need for families to travel to Tampa. Babies in need of a higher level of NICU care can always be stabilized and transported to St. Joseph’s Women’s Hospital Level IV NICU.
St. Joseph’s Hospital-North’s NICU location is adjacent to the hospital’s Mom and Baby unit and is converted from a space that formerly housed adult medical and surgical patient rooms.
