The neonatal intensive care unit at Sioux City’s UnityPoint St. Luke’s hospital has expanded its vision care for infants with the addition of two retinal imaging cameras.
Unit Nurse Manager Abby Laws says their Optomologist Rich Walski recommended the cameras to help them diagnose, monitor and treat serious eye conditions. “They are very important for darker complected babies and we serve a very diverse population of patients here in Sioux City, Iowa. So once he made us aware of that, we set forth trying to acquire these lenses for the RetCam that we use for screening our babies,” Laws says.
Clinician Teresa Streeter says the new cameras give a much better picture of what’s happening. “On some of our babies it was really difficult to be able to see the vessels. So that’s when Dr. Walski brought up the 80 degree lens, which allows light to kind of disperse differently so that we can see all the way out to the periphery of where the vessels are,” she says.
They worked with the hospital foundation and local Lions clubs to get donations for the cameras, including a $38,000 donation from Lions International. Steve Rehmann is the past district governor of the Northwest Iowa Lions clubs and says every one contributed to the project.
“Our mission was clear: strengthen the units existing vision screening capabilities by providing additional lenses and equipment that expand capacity, reduce wait times, and help deliver timely, accurate results for premature and medically fragile infants,” he says.
The hospital expects to use the equipment on the 100 babies who are born there each year.
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