Shruti Gupta, MD, is medical director of the newborn intensive care unit (NICU) at Yale New Haven Health-Greenwich Hospital. She cares for babies who are premature or are born with conditions including respiratory distress, difficulty feeding, or surgical issues that were diagnosed either prenatally or at birth.
Dr. Gupta says she was drawn to medicine as a child because her grandfather and great grandfather were physicians. “I love children, so I knew I wanted to do pediatrics. When I did my pediatric residency, I was really drawn towards neonatology, babies can be born extremely sick but they are resilient and you can help them. They recover quickly and their parents are grateful,” she says.
Providing family-centered care is a focus for Dr. Gupta. “I always want our providers to understand that we need to think from a parent’s perspective. Our job is not just to care for the baby, but the whole family,” she says. “We talk to them and include them in the smallest decisions and involve them in the care, including changing diapers.”
In the past 20 years, there have been so many advances in neonatology, Dr. Gupta notes. “This includes babies born at 25 to 26 weeks who can be completely healthy, and even those born earlier who need specialized care but can have a good quality of life,” she says. “I love taking care of sick infants and the best part of my job is when parents come back to visit us with their kids or send us pictures and tell us how well their child is doing.”
In addition to being a neonatologist, Dr. Gupta specializes in breastfeeding medicine with a special focus on preterm mothers and babies. Her goal is to get the family through the difficult first few weeks or months so that they can enjoy a normal breastfeeding experience.
Dr. Gupta is passionate about quality improvement in the NICU. “If I identify a problem, I will not rest until it’s fixed,” she says. “I am very persistent when it comes to making sure our babies get the best, evidence-based care.”
Her research interests focus on the impact of various neonatal practices in the NICU and after discharge that lead to poor breastfeeding outcomes for preterm infants. She is involved in developing follow-up care programs for families when they transition from the NICU to home. “We hold parents’ hands so much when their child is in the NICU, but when they come home, they still have a lot of questions, this is meant to support them,” she explains.
