Newborns across the Pikes Peak Region who need urgent, specialized medical care now have a faster path to it. CommonSpirit Health’s Flight for Life at St. Francis Medical Center has launched a specialized Neonatal Transport Team designed to move critically ill infants from hospitals across southern Colorado to the advanced care they need.
According to KKTV, the team will help move newborns who need advanced care from communities across the region, responding to hospitals in both rural and urban settings. CommonSpirit St. Francis Hospital and CommonSpirit Flight for Life formally announced the program on November 2, describing it as a way of bringing babies to new heights in care, according to CommonSpirit Health. The health system says the program extends the life-saving expertise of its Neonatal Intensive Care Unit beyond the hospital’s own walls.
A Dedicated Team Built Around Tiny Patients
The new unit includes a neonatal nurse and a neonatal respiratory therapist, per the station’s report, bringing specialized newborn expertise directly into the transport process rather than waiting for infants to arrive at a larger facility. Jennie Seiter, the team’s lead respiratory therapist, said rural communities often lack resources, which is why she believes the team will be so pivotal for small towns. The Flight for Life team serves some of the smallest patients in southern Colorado, and officials say the overarching goal is simple: help babies get the care they need as quickly as possible.
Why Rural Families Face an Uphill Climb
The challenge facing rural newborns and their families is not unique to southern Colorado. A survey analysis of 89 rural hospitals with childbirth services found that 56.2% were located more than 60 miles from the nearest neonatal intensive care unit, while roughly a third sat between 30 and 60 miles away, according to the Journal of Perinatology. Only 5.6% of those hospitals had an onsite NICU, and none reported an offsite NICU within 10 miles. The same analysis found that every Critical Access Hospital and every hospital in a less populated, noncore county was at least 30 miles from NICU-level care.
Those distances translate into real strain for rural families. From January through August of 2025, Prowers Medical Center transferred an average of two women per month to facilities outside the county for higher-level care, according to Rocky Mountain PBS. That figure represented 20% of the hospital’s 80 total obstetrics inpatient admissions during that stretch. The outlet also reported that air transport providers log more than 60 air medical transfers of pregnant patients each year across Colorado’s Eastern Plains.
How Other Colorado Programs Handle Newborn Transfers
CommonSpirit’s new team joins an existing landscape of neonatal transport services in Colorado. Children’s Hospital Colorado operates its Children’s One Flight program across a seven-state region, using a helicopter, a fixed-wing plane and two ambulances specifically outfitted to care for newborns, according to Children’s Hospital Colorado. That program runs around the clock, every day of the year, and its listed services include head and body cooling to treat brain injuries or impaired brain function in newborns.
For now, the focus in the Pikes Peak Region remains on getting the CommonSpirit team into motion for the infants who need it most. With a neonatal nurse and respiratory therapist now built into Flight for Life’s response capability, hospital officials are framing the effort as a direct answer to the resource gaps rural communities have long faced when a newborn’s condition turns critical.
