Campbell County hospital unveils neonatal transport service

GILLETTE — With the help of Campbell County Health, new mothers from nearby communities who undergo the hardship of a premature birth may have far less distance to travel as their new child receives recovery care.

The hospital’s new neonatal transport service is designed to care for premature babies, many of whom require serious and immediate attention while being transported to a longer-term care facility.

According to Maternal Child Manager Cass Hurley, the program will allow the hospital to transport pre-term babies from nearby communities such as Douglas, Buffalo and Sheridan to the hospital in Gillette, which contains the most advanced neonatal facilities in the state, instead of having them be flown down to Denver. This will significantly cut down travel time for affected families.

“Here at Campbell County Health, in the maternal child department, we have a level two special care nursery, or NICU, as it’s referred to a lot of times, so we deliver babies 32 weeks and older here and keep them here and care for them,” Hurley said.

Asked about the range of the service, Hurley said that there was no clear line with the team considering each request individually. It has received requests from as far as Billings, Montana.

A lot of surrounding communities deliver at 37 weeks or greater, Hurley added.

“There’s a population of babies that we can keep that are close to us, or more close to us, that they would typically transfer out,” she said.

Babies that are born between 37 and 38 weeks are considered early-term, with a full-term pregnancy lasting between 38 and 42 weeks. Those born before 37 weeks are considered preterm, often displaying breathing and feeding problems due to not having time to fully develop inside the mother as well as dangerously low weight. In these cases, the children are often placed in intensive care for weeks as they continue to develop.

“It keeps these families closer to their home community, so it’s less of a burden for travel,” Hurley said. “A baby born at 32 weeks potentially has eight weeks that it needs to stay in a nursery to finish developing before that baby is ready to go home.”

Looking back on the past few months, both Hurley and CCH’s Public Relations/Communication Specialist Kerry Cash commended the effort put forward by the hospital’s neonatal team and EMS services, particularly neonatal nurse practitioner Tracy Wasserburger, to bring the program into reality, stating that it required a lot of training to take what they knew and apply it to situations outside of the hospital setting.

“We provide the care in the hospital, but it is a different ballgame when you’re maybe on the side of a road in the back of an ambulance … but the nursing staff is excited, the EMS staff is excited, and we’re just hoping to provide something very positive for the surrounding communities,” Hurley said.

While the service officially began recently, Hurley shared that a situation in January had them jumping into action early, when the hospital received word of a baby born prematurely down in Douglas.

“We’ve been working on this program for several months, getting all of the Ts crossed and the Is dotted, but back in January, a provider called us from Douglas who had a 35-week baby that was born there, and they were having trouble getting the baby transferred out,” she said. “We had a nurse who did work up here with us, and she knew we were working on this project… We coordinated it and decided that this will be our first one, because we have the resources in place and everything at that point.”

Cash said the new program has garnered positive responses from both the community as well as outlying hospitals that the service will be able to support.

“It has received a great deal of attention and many positive comments from the community, realizing that this was a much needed service,” Cash said. “The Douglas providers, they have called me because we’ve done two from Douglas now, and providers have been so thrilled that it’s an option in addition to what they’re already doing.”

This story was published on April 28, 2025.