CHI St. Vincent HS to join Children’s Nursery Alliance

CHI St. Vincent Hot Springs is joining Arkansas Children’s Hospital’s Nursery Alliance as part of its continuing mission “to create a healing presence to make sure our communities are healthier,” Anthony Houston, president of CHI St. Vincent Hot Springs, said as part of a joint announcement by both hospitals Wednesday.

The Nursery Alliance coordinates care between neonatologists at ACH’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit and physicians in CHI St. Vincent Hot Springs’ Anthony Childbirth Center, further improving the quality of newborn care, a release said.

“Knowing that we have such a resource in Little Rock at Arkansas Children’s and with other community hospitals like Conway Regional, who we also partner with in many other

ways, it’s nice to be able to collaborate in taking care of the next generation of Arkansans,” Houston said in a videotaped portion of the announcement.

CHI St. Vincent Hot Springs is the newest hospital member of the alliance, which was established in 2016. Neonatologists at ACH will provide immediate consults to physicians at CHI St. Vincent Hot Springs, educational support, quality data review, implementation of best practices and provide training through telemedicine to improve neonatal care and provide support to help the babies at both hospitals “get the best care possible,” the release said.

The alliance also offers opportunities to track and monitor outcomes, participate in ongoing research and provides the chance for follow-ups post-discharge by monitoring and measuring other health conditions through an expanded High Risk Newborn Clinic network.

“Arkansas Children’s is creating a statewide network of care in order to deliver the right care at the right time close to home for the children of this state,” Marcy Doderer, president and CEO of ACH, said in the release.

“We will meet collaboratively as an alliance with each hospital, bringing their data, their quality matrix and their own level of expertise to that table in a shared way so that together we can figure out the next best protocol and we can understand how to better educate caregivers or parents who take care of children differently,” Doderer said in a videotaped interview.

“Members of the alliance raise the quality of everyone in a collaborative, collective manner,” she said. “As the alliance grows, which we hope it will, and we are talking with other hospitals across the state, we will have better and more direct impact to other nurseries throughout the state, thereby lowering the infant mortality rate in southwestern Arkansas and making it a safer, healthier place to be a child in Arkansas.”

Doderer said the alliance “is about keeping kids and families as close to home as possible” and “making sure we can impact health care without having to own and operate it all. It allows us to bring a level of expertise and services that Children’s has been known for and celebrated for 100 years into the community of Hot Springs, partnering with Tony and his team at CHI St. Vincent. We are very excited to do this in Hot Springs.”

Houston said CHI St. Vincent Hot Springs, which has been part of the Hot Springs community for 130 years, is “positioned as a gateway to southwest Arkansas.”

“We really take pride in being the largest facility in southwest Arkansas for health care,” he said.

“It’s really nice to align with Children’s and partner together in this part of the state to really make available the services here in Garland County and throughout southwest Arkansas. We’ll always have Children’s in Little Rock, but it’s nice to project Children’s services through St. Vincent here in Garland County.”

ACH operates the state’s only designated Level IV NICU, with 100 beds, the highest level of acute care, and has access to pediatric specialists from all disciplines. CHI St. Vincent Hot Springs manages the largest birthing center in the region it serves, with physicians delivering nearly 1,000 newborns every year, the release said.

The Anthony Childbirth Center has the capacity for 15 newborns. The nursing staff is made up entirely of registered nurses, and CHI St. Vincent’s Level II nursery can provide care for most infants. The center had 991 deliveries in 2017.

The neonatal period is specific to the first four weeks after birth, neonate or newborn, a time when critical changes happen rapidly. Feeding patterns are established, bonding between parents and infant begin, the risk of infections that may become more serious are higher, and many birth or congenital defects are first noted. This care is usually centered on newborn infants with a range of problems, varying between prematurity, birth defects, infection, cardiac malformations and surgical problems.

“We have provided quality and compassionate care to the next generation of Arkansans for decades,” Houston said. “With this new nursery alliance, the newborns and new mothers of southwest Arkansas will be the most important beneficiaries of our partnership.”

The Anthony Childbirth Center is named in honor of the Anthony family, long-standing benefactors of CHI St. Vincent and health services in Hot Springs and all of south and southwest Arkansas. The Katherine C. Anthony Charitable Trust will be used to help fund an extensive remodeling of the CHI St. Vincent Hot Springs center to allow for an improved model of patient care for mothers and newborns, while also improving the functional and aesthetic appearance of the center, the release said.

Houston noted they are partnering with Children’s “at an important time in our history, as we change our model to meet the needs of the community. Everything we’re moving toward here will allow us to continue improving the already excellent level of patient care provided by our clinicians.”