By Marjory Inglis, health reporter

A SPECIALLY-DESIGNED, high specification ambulance exclusively for the use of tiny babies will arrive at Dundee’s Ninewells Hospital later this week.

The ambulance is one of four being made available across Scotland following investment by the Scottish Executive in a national neonatal transport service.

At the moment premature and very sick babies are moved around Scotland in adult ambulances that are not specially equipped to transport tiny infants.

Dr Matthis Schwager, a neonatal consultant at Ninewells Hospital, who is part of a recently formed team that can be dispatched across Scotland to collect babies and care for them while they are being transferred between hospitals, is looking forward to the arrival of the new ambulance on Wednesday.

He explained that Scottish Neonatal Transport was a service set up to cover three large regions. The north region covered everywhere north of Dundee, including the islands north of mainland Scotland, and responsibility for that region was shared between Dundee and Aberdeen with a team in each city being on call for half the week.

Though the service is delivered locally, it is funded and organised centrally and central funding is providing four specially equipped ambulances, with one heading for Glasgow, one to Edinburgh, another to Aberdeen and one to be based in Dundee.

“The beauty about it is they are geared up for transporting babies,” said Dr Schwager.

“It is all part of the drive within the national neonatal transport service to have standardised, dedicated equipment. That was one of the original objectives of setting up this national service—that we are all working with equipment that is standardised.”

In the recent past, before the advent of Scottish Neonatal Transport, doctors operated an informal system amongst themselves of checking round units for the availability of cots and making arrangements for the transfer of infants.

With the unpredictability of premature births, neonatal cots can come under pressure, especially when a mother goes into labour early with twins or triplets.

That is why babies needing specialist care can end up being moved hundreds of miles from their nearest hospital.

The transport service not only deals with emergencies but also transfers babies between hospitals for investigations and gets involved in non-urgent work transferring babies back to their home region.

The new ambulance also has the ability to carry two incubators at a time.

“Once we are happy that everybody is familiar with the new layout and with the way everything works in the ambulance, it will be out on the road,” said Dr Schwager.