What Parents Need to Know
When your newborn needs urgent medical care, there is often little time to prepare—emotionally or logistically. For families facing a neonatal emergency, especially those delivering in rural or smaller hospitals across Texas, the experience can be overwhelming. One moment, you’re focused on welcoming your baby into the world. The next, you’re being told your child is being rushed to a major hospital hours away for specialized care you’ve never even heard of.
We created this section of our site to help you in that moment of confusion and fear.
At Van Wey, Metzler & Williams, we’ve spent decades advocating for families impacted by medical negligence during pregnancy, labor, and neonatal care. In that time, we’ve heard from countless parents who felt blindsided—both by the medical event itself and by the sudden relocation to a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) they knew nothing about.
Why These Facilities Matter
Texas is a large and medically complex state, but when it comes to the highest levels of neonatal care, there are only a limited number of NICUs equipped to handle the most critical cases. These facilities are typically located in urban centers—Dallas, Houston, Austin, and Fort Worth—and serve as referral hospitals for entire regions of the state.
If you give birth in a rural hospital and your baby requires specialized intervention (whether due to prematurity, birth trauma, or complications during labor), your child will likely be stabilized and then transferred—often by air—to one of these select NICUs. This is standard medical protocol, but it leaves families scrambling to understand what happens next.
What You’ll Find in These Pages
The pages that follow include detailed, hospital-specific information about some of the leading NICU facilities in Texas. We’ve gathered and verified this information to help families better understand:
- The level of care offered (Level III or Level IV NICU designations)
- What types of conditions are treated at each facility
- Support services available for parents and families
- Unique strengths or areas of focus at each hospital
Our goal is not just to share logistics, but to empower you with knowledge—so you can ask better questions, advocate for your baby’s care, and navigate this deeply emotional journey with more clarity and support.
Compassion, Not Panic
Importantly, we want you to feel reassured—not alarmed. Most NICU admissions are precautionary or involve treatable conditions. But for the families whose babies suffer life-altering injuries due to lapses in care, it’s natural to want to understand what went wrong. We hope these pages serve both groups: those simply seeking information and those seeking answers.
If at any point you feel your child may have suffered a preventable injury, and you are seeking compassionate legal guidance, we invite you to read our final paragraph on each page. It’s there not to frighten you—but to let you know that, should you ever need us, we are here.
Find Your Hospital Here:
Baylor University Medical Center
Children's Medical Center of Dallas
Cook Children's Medical Center
Medical City Dallas Hospital
Memorial Hermann - Texas Medical Center
St. David's Medical Center
Texas Children's Hospital -Houston
The Woman's Hospital of Texas
