Every year 260 babies need extra help to survive. Rotorua Daily Post reporter Alison King visits Rotorua Hospital's Special Care Baby Unit (SCBU) to learn more.
Who needs Rotorua SCBU?
Infants born at 32 weeks gestation or more
Full term infants with respiratory distress - usually 3-4 days
Full
term infants with low blood glucose levels - usually 3-4 days
Preterm infants admitted until they are fully suckling and gaining weight - a 32-week infant may be in hospital for 4-6 weeks.
Infants born earlier than 32 weeks can be transferred when stable.
Christina Phillips was 31 weeks pregnant when she heard a jumbled sentence containing the words baby, die and week.
Less than 24 hours later, at 6.22am January 18, the mum of four had given birth in Waikato Hospital by emergency caesarean and under general anaesthetic. It would be 15 hours before she would be able to see her daughter Tazmyn Nevaeh Phillips, who was born weighing 1550g (3lb 4oz).
"And then it was for only a couple of minutes as I had a sudden head rush and had to go back to the ward. We had our first skin to skin when she was a week old."
Tazmyn was kept in the SCBU at Waikato Hospital until February 15, when she was transferred by ambulance to the Rotorua unit.
This unit can look after up to 12 babies at any one time and is staffed by two registered nurses each shift. When the Rotorua Daily Post first visited Tazmyn, aged four weeks and one day, there were four babies in the unit.
Having Tazmyn transferred meant the world of difference to Christina, who at one point thought she was going to lose her baby.
When she was told she had to go to Waikato Hospital her first thought was for her three older children - Tamaia, 15, Jeremiah, 5 and Jade, 2. She had to organise care for them, pack a bag and return to Rotorua Hospital. From there she was whisked to Hamilton in an ambulance, not knowing Tazmyn would appear the next day.
She was alone in Waikato Hospital. Her family visited when they could.
"I was on the ward for four days and when they discharged me I stayed at Hilda Ross House, it was a 15 minute walk to get to the hospital, painful, but it was the thought of seeing my baby that helped me get there.
"It's great being here - we were too far away. My other kids had to stay behind and Tamaia went from being a teenager to a full-on mum. I came back the night before and we met Tazmyn at the hospital the next day."
In Rotorua SCBU Christina has learned how to connect Tazmyn's oxygen tubes, measure medication, take her temperature, change her nappy, bath her and feed her. "It's just like having a baby at home - but in a hospital. At Waikato all we could do was touch her because she was in an incubator."
Tazmyn was kept in the SCBU until March 25, when she was able to spend her first night at home with her family.
Had she been born on her due date she would have been five days old.
We meet back at her Mitchell Downs home. Tazmyn was fast asleep, swaddled and attached to a monitor to make sure she kept breathing.
To get discharged Christina had to spend 24 hours at the hospital to prove she could do everything required for her baby. This included knowing how to monitor her and being able to give CPR should she need it.
"We're back to reality now," Christina says.
Being able to learn how to handle such a precious baby whose needs were far greater than her previous children was a new learning experience, she says, but the burden was lifted greatly by being close to home.
"Being in Hamilton [was] too hard. I probably would have had to come back home and travelled in every day from here. I wasn't able to cope with everything. This is the hardest thing I've ever had to deal with, I wouldn't wish it on anyone."