Imperial College London

Academic Institute

Chris Gale

nnrd43

This study is lead by Chief Investigator: Dr Christopher Gale with Co-investigators: Dr Kjell Helenius and Professor Liisa Lehtonen (Turku University Hospital, Finland) Professor Neena Modi and Statistician: Dr Nicholas Longford. Every year about 3,000 babies are born extremely preterm (less than 28 gestational weeks) in England and Wales, most of these babies will require specialist neonatal intensive care. Neonatal intensive care is a high cost service that is not available at all hospitals. As preterm birth can happen very quickly or with little warning, many very preterm babies are born at hospitals without neonatal intensive care services. When this happens babies are stabilised at the local hospital before specialised neonatal transport teams travel to the hospital, further stabilise the baby and then transfer them to a neonatal intensive care unit at a different hospital. This 'acute postnatal transfer' of extremely preterm babies is a difficult and complex undertaking, and pevious studies show it is associated with increased rates of deaths and severe illness among babies that need it. However, these previous studies undertaken 20-30 years ago when neonatal care and neonatal transport systems were very different and as a result we do not know what the effect of early postnatal transfer is on extremely preterm babies in the current NHS. This is important because the number of extremely preterm babies that receive an acute postnatal transfer is increasing. The aim of this research is understand how acute postnatal transfer impacts on rates of death and serious illness in extremely preterm babies in the UK. We will do this by comparing extremely preterm babies who required acute postnatal transfer with those babies that did not. We will take into account other factors that might be different between the babies (for example how sick they are) by adjusting for these factors and by carefully matching the babies that we compare. We will use anonymised, historical data held within the National Neonatal Research Database (NNRD) to do this.

REC reference: 16/EM/0351

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