Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford has recently opened a new Center for Comprehensive Fetal Health & Maternal and Family Care, to support families through complicated fetal diagnoses and provide coordinated, family-centered care for mothers and infants with difficult diagnoses, before and after birth.

The new center works to ensure that each patient receives cohesive care from all subspecialties appropriate to the case. The Center for Fetal Health is a ‘virtual center,’ building communication between services and subspecialties and facilitating regular meetings between physicians from every relevant discipline to develop individualized care plans for each woman and fetus.

Susan Hintz, the center’s medical director and associate professor in neonatal and developmental medicine, said: “The new center is a unique collaborative among many disciplines at Packard Children’s and Stanford Hospital & Clinics. Our aim is to provide outstanding care to women carrying fetuses with complex anomalies, starting before their infants are born.”

Yasser El-Sayed, associate chief of maternal-fetal medicine at Packard Children’s Hospital, said: “We’re bringing together all of our very sophisticated medicine, counseling and social care with clear leadership and a streamlined approach to getting a patient through a complex system. With better prenatal imaging and maternal-fetal medicine dramatically improving survival for high-risk neonates, demand for advanced fetal care is bigger than ever.”