Diseases
Conditions and diagnoses that come up in neonatal care, explained in plain language.
Physician-created · English & Español
NICU
Your Prescription for Understanding™
The NICU has a language of its own. NICU Jargon Rx turns that language into something a family and their care team can actually share, one card at a time.
The problem
Families arrive in the NICU and are handed a vocabulary no one ever asked to learn.
Rounds move quickly. Terminology arrives faster than anyone can absorb it.
Diagnoses, procedures, imaging studies, abbreviations, machine names, numbers on a monitor. Parents nod along because they want to keep up, then leave the bedside carrying questions they didn’t have the words for.
Care teams feel it too. Explaining well takes time that a busy unit rarely has, and the same explanations get rebuilt from scratch at every bedside.
What it is
Understanding changes everything.
NICU Jargon Rx is a set of physical educational cards that translate the terminology of the NICU into clear, respectful, plain language.
Not simplified medicine. Not a pamphlet. A designed reference a parent can hold, return to, and bring into the next conversation with their team, and a teaching tool a nurse or physician can reach for in the moment it is needed.
The system
Five ways to make the NICU easier to understand.
NICU Jargon Rx organizes the language of neonatal care into five color-coded categories, so a family or a clinician can find the right card quickly, without hunting through everything else.
Vocabulary
The terminology and shorthand used at the bedside and on rounds every day.
Respiratory
Breathing-related concepts, equipment and terminology encountered in the NICU.
Nutrition
How babies are fed and nourished in neonatal care, and the words that go with it.
Imaging
The imaging studies a baby may have, and the language attached to them.
The founder
Made by someone who has had the conversation.
NICU Jargon Rx was created by a neonatologist who kept watching the same thing happen: a family nodding through an explanation that hadn’t landed.
Not because anyone was doing anything wrong. Because the language of neonatal medicine is genuinely difficult, and the moment a family meets it is rarely a moment they are ready to learn.
Dr. Theodor Uzamere, MD, MHS
Board-certified pediatrician and neonatologist · Founder
Two languages
ENES English & Español
Now available in Spanish.
Every NICU Jargon Rx card is available in English and in Spanish, so more of the families a unit cares for can read the same explanation in the language they think in.
Understanding shouldn’t depend on which language is spoken at the bedside.
The film
Why Understanding Matters
A short film about the distance between what is said in the NICU and what a family is able to hear, and what closing it makes possible.
NICU Jargon Rx is an educational resource. It does not diagnose or treat any condition and is not a substitute for individualized medical advice from a qualified healthcare professional.
For hospitals & institutions
Bring NICU Jargon Rx to your hospital.
NICU admission. Parent education. Prenatal consultation. Discharge teaching. Family resource centers. Wherever the language gets in the way, the cards can help.