graduating to PICU?

[umcRN, BSN, RN]

I was just wondering if any NICU's out there "graduated" their older babies to the PICU at some point. We just had two first birthday parties and I think our last longest stay was 15 months...kid was in the PICU a week after he was discharged from us, but we never send them down there before they are discharged. I was wondering if other places do this and if you do send to picu, at what point?

[NICU_babyRN, BSN, RN]

We send kids to PICU around 9 months of age if discharge is nowhere near AND if we also need the space for other babies.

Our cardiac infants go to PICU for about 1wk after cardiac repair and then come back to NICU to continue doing the "feeder/grower" thing. The only reason they stay in PICU after surgery is bc it's closer to ECMO and the OR itself in case of emergency. Many times depending on the size of the baby (grams and weeks) a NICU nurse floats to PICU specifically to care for the neonate.

[umcRN, BSN, RN]

thanks for that info! We really should move some of ours to the PICU, we occaisionally get cardiac babies after surgery but we have a large CICU and heart and kidney unit so unless the babies were preemies they stay their own course with the cardiac units, some of our older ones could really be CICU kiddos as they usually have pulmonary hypertension, but the CICU docs don't want to fill their beds with our babies so they follow them in the NICU, it can be frustrating though sometimes, having these older babies and not really having the knowledge base to go with them, not only in regards to developmental care, but that our docs continue to insist to treat them as neonates and use neonate drug doses for them which is not always appropriate, especially in the case of narcotics