Retrieval of neonatal and paediatric patients on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation support in New South Wales, Australia.

New South Wales has recently added the capability of extracorporeal membrane oxygenation to the neonatal and paediatric retrieval process and this paper describes the early experiences and protocol development for the first eight cases transported.

Mobile pediatric neurosurgery: rapid response neurosurgery for remote or urgent pediatric patients.

Object: Time-critical neurosurgical conditions require urgent operative treatment to prevent death or neurological deficits. In New South Wales/Australian Capital Territory patients' distance from neurosurgical care is often great, presenting a challenge in achieving timely care for patients with acute neurosurgical conditions.

Methods: A protocol was developed to facilitate consultant neurosurgery locally.

Potentially avoidable neonatal retrievals in New South Wales: a retrospective analysis.

Objective: To identify areas for improvement in outcomes in retrieved newborns by reviewing newborn retrieval activity and evaluating potentially avoidable retrievals from each referring hospital stratified by the level of service delivery over the study period.

Design: A retrospective analysis of newborn retrievals from 1 January 2006 to 31 December 2009.

Setting: Newborn and Paediatric Emergency Transport Service (NETS).

Traumatic bleeding at birth treated with Factor VII.

We report 36 week gestation twins born following a traumatic delivery. Twin 2 had profuse haemorrhage where haemostasis was achieved with recombinant Factor VIIa (rFVIIa - NovoSeven;Novo Nordisk A/S, Bagsvaerd, Denmark).

A quality audit of the service delivered by the NSW Neonatal and Paediatric Transport Service.

Aim: To discover areas of NSW Neonatal and Paediatric Transport Service's (NETS) work with which the parents, referring and receiving doctors are dissatisfied and respond to them.

Methods: An anonymous survey of referring doctors, parents of patients transported by NETS and receiving hospital doctors between July and December 2005.

Results: Referring doctors: Fifty-seven per cent of the 288 (30% response rate) doctors who responded were paediatricians and 43% worked in rural settings.

Transporting newborn infants with suspected duct dependent congenital heart disease on low-dose prostaglandin E1 without routine mechanical ventilation.

Aim: To evaluate the safety of transporting newborn infants with suspected duct dependent congenital heart disease (CHD) treated with prostaglandin E1 (PGE1) without routine mechanical ventilation.

Methods: A retrospective population-based audit of newborn infants with suspected CHD transported on PGE1 by the New South Wales newborn and paediatric Transport Service from 1995 through 2005.

Results: Mechanical ventilation was not used prior to treatment with PGE1 in 94 (31%) of the 300 infants.