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Predicting the future for newborns requiring intensive care

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Abstract

When intensive care for newborns was introduced thirty years ago its primary goal was to improve the rates of survival of sick and premature infants. Medicine has been successful in attaining this goal; however, as more infants survive, the cost of intensive care and the additional cost of services and care for handicapped survivors continue to escalate. In order to curb the increasing cost of newborn intensive care, heightened initiatives directed at the prevention of premature births will be necessary.

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Dr. Papile is a professor of pediatrics at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine in Albuquerque, where she is Director of the Neonatology Fellowship Program. Her primary research interest is neonatal brain injury. She is a principal investigator of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development’s Multicenter Network of Neonatal Intensive Care Units grant, a five-year, 12-center initiative to assess the efficacy of widespread treatment modalities in neonatal intensive care. In 1992, as a Congressional Fellow with the Select Committee for Children, Youth and Families, she studies health care reform initiatives and their potential impact on the health care of women and children.

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Papile, LA. Predicting the future for newborns requiring intensive care. Human Nature 5, 95–102 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02692193

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02692193

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