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Recently, Julie Mai and Stephanie Steffen were sent by helicopter to check on an expectant mother at a remote clinic.

They quickly realized that the baby's life depended on an emergency delivery.

Without hesitation, they went to work...

Values in Action

Stephanie Steffen, LRT, RRT-NPS
Respiratory Therapist
Pediatric Respiratory Care:
You don't realize the power of a team until you are in a very high stress situation.

Julie Mai, RN, RNC-NIC, C-NPT
Neonatal Transport Nurse
Neonatal Intensive Care Unit:
We heard there was a pregnant mom in the clinic -- who was 23 weeks, so very early -- and I remember Dr. Carey telling me 'you probably won't have to deliver her, you'll probably just go and, oh, she'll be fine and you won't deliver'. --

Stephanie:
You called my phone in the unit and told me that I was going out on transport, because my pager hadn't gone off. So it was then well was like oh, my gosh, I'm not ready. I need to go change, and I had no idea that this was happening and I didn't know what I was going for. And you just told me, hey, we're gonna go for a 23-week baby in a clinic and we're just going to, you know, go assess the situation and check it out. And I was like, oh, okay [laughter from Julie]-- sounds good! I had no idea, you know, all the extra stuff.

Julie:
And then when we got there and decided, oh, yep, we're gonna deliver a baby in a clinic,

Stephanie:
and they were giving us the stats of where mom was at, it was definitely evident that we were going to be delivering. When we told them like, this is going to happen. A lot of people whom I will never know, really went into action and helped us out.

Julie:
Because everyone did their job so well that we literally, yes, could just focus on what we do, how we resuscitate these babies and we didn't have to worry about all the other stuff.

Stephanie:
I mean, the amount of people that were there that day was very helpful.

Julie:
The maintenance man that was able to turn up the heat, because with the little babies, they're like a pound. So we need to keep them warm and we didn't have our warmer. And so just the fact of like, oh yeah, I can turn up the building heat. Everybody did their job so seamlessly.

Stephanie:
We asked what we needed and somebody was there to do it or found a way to get it done.

Julie:
Yup

Stephanie:
And I think that part made us focus on the baby and the teamwork of everybody else helped us do our job and got that baby delivered, resuscitated, and back to Mayo safely.

I mean, that patient went home and is thriving because of all the people there that day.

When one of the most difficult times of their life, we get to be the light for them. And that's...

Julie:
It's powerful...

Stephanie:
Very rewarding.

Julie:
Yeah.

Stephanie:
There's a lot of people that always ask me how I do what I do. I just tell them, the day I get to help a mom hold for the first time, or I get to see them leave the hospital with tears in their eyes, just so happy to finally get to go and live a normal life.

Those are the reasons I work in the NICU .

Values in Action

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