Big ICUs said to be better for infants

Thousands of newborns could be saved each year if officials closed some of the nation’s smaller neonatal intensive care units, according to a study that suggests larger hospitals are better able to treat the infants.

Extremely premature babies were up to twice as likely to survive when treated at a busy, advanced-care center rather than one of the many community hospitals that have opened such ICUs in recent years.

Even among the most advanced centers, those that handled the most babies had the best survival records, said Stanford University health economist Ciaran Phibbs, lead author of the study in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine.