As the flagship children’s hospital in the Gulf South region, Manning Family Children’s is securing its status as a life-saving sanctuary for Louisiana’s newborns with the recently announced expansion of its Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), providing a seismic leap forward in its capacity to save the most fragile of lives.
Louisiana is at the epicenter of a neonatal catastrophe, with the state featuring the second-highest preterm birth rates in the country. In 2025 alone, Manning Family Children’s cared for 44 micro-preemies, the most in the hospital’s history. With a current facility operating at 35 beds, capacity is well under demand, and if there is a time to reverse course on what is a rising need, it is now. Thankfully, spearheaded by a $34 million investment, Manning Family Children’s is moving into a new era of care by building a new 60-bed Level 4 NICU that will change the lives of children today with the facilities and technologies of tomorrow.
“For more than 70 years, Manning Family Children’s has stood in the gap for children and families in their most fragile moments,” said Lucio A. Fragoso, President and CEO of Manning Family Children’s. “The vision for our expanded state-of-the-art NICU is simple—to build a future for Louisiana’s littlest to thrive. This means more miracles, more birthdays, more first steps, and a lifetime of memories made possible thanks to our team’s unmatched expertise.”
When every second matters, immediate access is vital. Because Manning Family Children’s is the state’s only facility with every pediatric subspecialty under one roof, the new NICU will feature a dedicated procedure space for handling the most complex cases on-site. By moving toward a private care environment that allows families to be “in room” with their newborns, this expansion promotes bonding while significantly improving infection prevention for developing immune systems. Along with additional care offerings for patients and their families, Manning Family Children’s is also enriching the region’s only neonatology fellowship program and the pediatric academic pipeline for LSU Health New Orleans and Tulane Medicine, growing the next generation of pediatric and neonatal providers to care for a region in desperate need of care…