The Kent Surrey and Sussex Neonatal Transfer Service (KSS NTS)
Sometimes babies are born in hospitals that do not have facilities to provide appropriate level of care. In these cases it may be necessary to transport them from one hospital to another. To enable babies to be transported as safely as possible, a dedicated neonatal transport service has been developed.
The Kent Surrey and Sussex neonatal Transfer service is a specialist neonatal transport service that transports babies across Kent, Surrey, Sussex and London and beyond. We are 3 teams that work together to provide a 24 hour service 7 days a week 365 days a year. Our base sites are at Medway Maritime in Gillingham, The Royal Sussex County Hospital in Brighton and here at St Peter's hospital in Chertsey.
Each team has a doctor, a senior nurse and ambulance crew. We specialise in providing emergency neonatal care during transport for those babies who are born too early or who are acutely sick needing specialist surgical centres. We also repatriate babies back to their local hospitals when they are recovered or getting better, so they can be closer to home.
We have our own neonatal transport ambulance, which enables us to move babies more efficiently and safely, and our transport incubators are specially designed and fully equipped so that we can provide intensive care during the journey if this is required. All babies are fully monitored throughout their journey.
We also offer to take one parent in the ambulance and they will sit in the front with the ambulance driver. For safety reasons, we like to ensure that any mothers that have just had their baby are fit and well to travel with us. The safe transfer of your baby is our main concern, and so the decision to allow a parent to accompany us in the ambulance will be made on an individual basis. If the mother is still an inpatient, we will ask the midwives to arrange the transfer of the mother separately.
We appreciate that moving to a different hospital can be stressful, and we will keep you fully informed of what will happen and explain what we are doing every step of the way. We welcome questions, and encourage parents to take photographs on the day their baby is transferred as it is another chapter in their neonatal journey.
