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Norton Children’s Hospital offers a 12-bed cardiac progressive care unit for children recovering from heart conditions. This progressive care unit, sometimes called a step-down unit, is for children who have reached a milestone in their recovery and no longer require intensive care in the Jennifer Lawrence Cardiac Intensive Care Unit (CICU).
Children in our progressive care unit are cared for by the board-certified, fellowship-trained pediatric cardiologists and nurse practitioners with Norton Children’s Heart Institute, affiliated with the UofL School of Medicine. Children are monitored closely with telemetry, a way to check vital signs remotely. Nurses in our progressive care unit also are specially trained to care for children with heart conditions.
Children needing care in an intensive care unit, such as the CICU, are typically the sickest, needing extremely close monitoring and care. As a child’s condition stabilizes and improves, they can graduate, or step down, to a progressive care unit. That’s why these units often are called step-down units. These children still receive specialized care and close monitoring by our heart specialists, but they have improved enough that they can move out of the CICU on their way to recover at home.