Brave Beginnings provides neonatal grants to hospitals across the country, including right here in Los Angeles. One of our local grantee hospitals is Good Samaritan Hospital, which has served the community since 1885.
Prior to the opening of the Davajan-Cabal Center for Perinatal Medicine 1989, the hospital had no obstetrics or neonatal units. The Center was created through the efforts of its hospital board chairman, Charles T. Munger, NICU director Dr. Luis Cabal, perinatal center medical and administrative director Dr. Val Davajan, and NICU associate director Dr. Bijan Siassi. Dr. Siassi brought a team approach to caring for preemies, involving staff in different specialties across the NICU care system, which was unusual for the time. As a neonatologist specializing in pediatric cardiology, Dr. Siassi has taught a course for the past 17 years at Good Samaritan focused on diagnosing and treating newborns with cardiac problems. The hospital’s NICU is led by highly experienced team members, including the section chief of Neonatology, Dr. Rangasamy Ramanathan, and NICU medical director Dr. Smeeta Sardesai. All three physicians also teach at the Keck School of Medicine of USC.
Good Samaritan Hospital has one of the busiest labor and delivery departments in the Los Angeles area, with nearly 100,000 babies born there in the past 25 years. The hospital has a level III Neonatal Intensive Care Unit staffed 24 hours a day by a highly trained team of neonatologists, nurses, neonatal nurse practitioners and social workers.
In 2016, Brave Beginnings awarded a grant to Good Samaritan for the purchase of a Giraffe shuttle, which allows hospitals to safely transport babies between departments in a warm, stable environment. Eliminating the need to transfer a baby from bed-to-bed, the shuttle in combination with a Giraffe or Panda bed helps reduce the potential for clinical problems that can result from interrupted patient thermal regulation, handling and movement, and potentially challenging physiological stability when moving babies to and from a transport incubator.
We are happy to have been able to assist Good Samaritan Hospital in its mission to provide excellent care to its tiniest patients.
