NEWBORN babies who need a life-saving treatment will no longer need to be transferred to Manchester or Liverpool thanks to a new service in East Lancashire.

Nitric oxide therapy is now available in the neonatal intensive care unit at the Lancashire Women and Newborn Centre at Burnley General Hospital.

The gas therapy is used to treat babies with pulmonary hypertension, abnormally high blood pressure in the arteries of the lungs, who despite being given maximum amounts of oxygen do not improve in health because of the condition.

Dr Naharmal Soni, consultant neonatologist at East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust, led the introduction of the therapy and trained ‘Nitric Champion’ nurses and matrons.

He said: “Nitric oxide therapy is a treatment for very sick babies.

“We amalgamated our units in Blackburn and Burnley when we created this unit.

"We wanted to get more advanced treatment into this unit and this is a very well established therapy in other big neonatal centres.

“Transferring a sick baby is not always very safe, so if we can hold them here that is a big plus for babies and families in East Lancashire.”

Ruksana Patel, matron on the unit, said the introduction of the service was “a huge achievement” for the team.

She said: “A lot of hard work, planning and training has gone into setting up nitric oxide therapy.

“We are all enthusiastic and excited about this new service. For the parents of these babies it will be one less thing to worry about.”

Pulmonary hypertension is a condition in some babies where the lung blood vessels get narrowed.

This means very little blood gets to the lungs to pick up oxygen, and so less oxygen goes around the rest of the body.

Nitric oxide helps improve this situation by quickly acting on lungs’ blood vessels and relaxing them, allowing more blood to get to the lungs, so that it can pick up more oxygen to go around the rest of the body.

The machine that delivers this gas into a standard ventilator is called an iNOvent.

Dr Soni said the trust had bought two ‘relatively inexpensive’ iNOvent machines. The gas costs around £40 per hour.