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The baby was born at 10:10 a.m. at Yale-New Haven Hospital, and he wasn’t breathing well. When the delivery team heard his congested grunts, they knew he should be seen by specialists right away. And specialists are around the corner in the Newborn Special Care Unit: highly skilled neonatal nurse practitioners, advanced residents, and professors from the Department of Pediatrics at the Yale School of Medicine.
Yale-New Haven Hospital opened the Newborn Special Care Unit–the world’s first–in 1960. The unit now has a 46-bed home near Labor and Delivery. There, premature infants and babies with congenital abnormalities or long-term problems receive devoted care from an unrivaled team of specialists. The unit calls on the expertise of Yale’s distinguished School of Nursing as well as the School of Medicine. It cares for 1,500 infants a year and regularly accepts transfers from hospitals in Connecticut, New York, and Rhode Island.
But that does not make any individual case less urgent and compelling. The infant’s parents have come through the hopes and cares of pregnancy and the drama of childbirth. This is their son, and the neonatal team can see that he is struggling for breath. There are no routine admissions to this unit.
“Problem-based learning” has become a watchword for many medical schools in recent years. At Yale, another phrase might be “patient-based learning”: we try to keep sight of the whole person–however tiny–and not allow the boundaries of departments or diseases to confine our view. For the basic sciences, this means bringing together knowledge from many fields with insights from practitioners. In clinical care, this means treating the patient as a full individual in a society, not as an isolated specimen of dysfunction. In education, this means an emphasis on the human dimension of medicine–not in opposition to the scientific dimension but integrally connected to it. For a newborn baby, this means receiving the best chance at survival that he could find anywhere.
Yale University School of Medicine
Yale-New Haven Hospital
Yale-New Haven Children’s Hospital
Yale Medical Group
Epidemiology and Public Health
Yale Cancer Center
Yale Child Study Center
Yale School of Nursing
Pierce Foundation
Connecticut Mental Health Center
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Faculty from the Yale School of Medicine’s Department of Pediatrics, as well as hospital staff, provide care for at-risk newborns and instruction for students, interns, and residents.
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Master of Public Health
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99
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Postdoctoral fellows & associates
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124
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Postgraduate fellows & associates
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413
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Joint degrees offered
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MD/PhD, MD/MPH,
MD/JD, MD/MBA
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Residency placements
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93 percent received one of their first three choices; 73 percent of graduates received their first choice.
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Funding for M.D. student research
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$735,000
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Community service
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Over 70 percent of Yale medical students volunteer.
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Yale-affiliated hospitals
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14
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Faculty
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380 tenured or continuing; 557 term, full-time; 380 research; 1,900 part-time
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Howard Hughes Medical
Institute investigators
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18
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National Academy of Sciences members
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25
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Institute of Medicine investigators
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17
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Grants received
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$280 million from 1,668 awards
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