I just became the assistant manager of a women's health care department. We just had consultants come in who have decided that our whole department needs to be changed around. We are a 200-bed hospital in the inner city. Administration has decided recently to close our Level II NICU and change the unit into a mother-infant couplet unit with just an observation Nursery staffed with one RN. The problem that we are having is we are still delivering Level II NICU infants that have to be stablized and transferred out. So we haven't been able to implement the mother-infant coupling but the consultants want it done right now. I am just trying to get advice from other nurses if this is a good idea and how we could make this work. We deliver between 50-70 infants a month and half of them need intermediate care(ie. drug abusers, preemies, r/o sepsis etc). The consultants want us to crosstrain the L&D, Nursery and Post Partum staff to work all three units so that they can cut staff in half. I know that this will take months especially to crosstrain to L&D. Has anyone else had to go through these kinds of changes and how did it work?