PIPER – or the Pediatric Infant Perinatal Emergency Retrieval – is a service for transferring infants, children and high-risk pregnant women between hospitals. It is based out of The Royal Children’s Hospital.

Mother Sharni and eight-week-old daughter Norah have used PIPER three times to be transported from their home in the state’s northeast for treatment at the RCH.

Norah went into fetal supraventricular tachycardia (SVT), meaning her heart was beating too fast, while in the womb.

“It was at 280 beats when she was in utero, so I had an emergency caesarean,” Sharni said. She had another SVT incident when Norah was 30 hours old, then averaged five similar incidents each day.

“Norah was a week old when the medication started settling in,” Sharni said. “Since then, she’s good for a week, then she gains weight and the medication doesn’t work.”

Since the initial treatments, Sharni has been diagnosed with Wolff-Parkinson-White, a heart condition in which an extra electrical pathway allows signals to travel through the heart too quickly, causing a rapid heartbeat.

A PIPER team, which in Norah’s case was two nurses and a driver, was dispatched to pick her up in country Victoria, about a two-hour drive from the RCH. She was loaded into an incubator and driven to Melbourne.

“We are a moving intensive care unit,” said Jo, a nurse practitioner on the PIPER team.

“Whatever the baby needs, we can provide. If we need to pull over on the side of the road and provide extra airway support or cardiovascular support, we can do that.”

PIPER receives about 5800 emergency referrals a year, about one third of them in rural and regional Victoria.

Sharni said: “I’m grateful to the PIPER team and the RCH.

“Norah is so lucky to have them looking after her.”