 Hello everyone, welcome to NICU Diaries episode number 2. I am your host Aryan Pandey, Dr Sanjeeva Reddy and Dr Ravishankar Swami. So, new question is, what are the criteria for determining if a newborn needs to be admitted in an NICU? We have certain criteria, for example, if the babies are born premature and they have some breathing difficulties or their weight is on the lower side or even some babies who are born at term but have some other various issues, like they have a heart condition, they have a problem with the tummy and so these are the commonest reasons why we admit the babies to the NICU. What are these new bonds with what birth rate needs to be in NICU? There is no absolute cutoff as such for a birth weight but generally what we find is if babies are born less than 1.5 kgs they invariably end up needing some form of NICU support at least for feeding or maybe a little bit of oxygen support in the first few days of life. So, before 34 weeks or if they are born 1.5 kgs are less then generally they are expected to need some form of support. And will mothers be allowed to stay in NICU with the babies? So, at this point of time we encourage something called as a kangaroo mother care so we expect parents to spend as much time as possible to stay with the baby but overnight we are not having facilities at this point of time to keep the mothers with the baby in the NICU and this is standard worldwide. And how long should the new born babies stay in NICU? It again depends on what is the indication for admission so the general guideline we keep is till they have completed 34 weeks of gestational age for example if a baby is born say 28 weeks they will need to stay till 34 weeks which is approximately 6 weeks. It is because that is the age when babies are expected to have feeding independently and most of their prematurely related problems tend to resolve by that age. So, what are the criteria for determining if a newborn needs to be admitted at NICU? So, in general what our experience shows that most common reason for admission to NICU we classify as all the pre-term babies they are the most commonest reason to get admitted something second one will be surgical problems some babies have tummy surgical problems cardiac problems something they are the second one thing and the third one will be some unexpected reason so even some babies will be born at term but they might have breathing difficulties they might have some from a brain injury or something and so these are unexpected admission. So, you can classify as three pre-term someone whom we know antinately that they have some problems and some third one is unexpected so these are the three classification of the admission to NICU. Thank you doctors for your valuable insight see you all in the next episode of NICU Diabetes.