The neonatal intensive care unit reunion happens on the first Saturday in March, on the lawn behind Winterfield Medical Center, and it has one recurring problem: the nurses almost never recognize anyone.

That is the nature of it. The last time most of these nurses saw most of these people, they weighed under two kilograms and were mostly obscured by equipment.

Two hundred and sixteen families

This year two hundred and sixteen families came. The youngest graduate was fourteen months. The oldest was thirty-one, a man named Dominic Ferreira who was born at twenty-seven weeks in 1995, and who brought his own daughter, born at Winterfield last year at a comfortable thirty-nine.

He found the nurse who had been on the night he was transferred out of the unit. She is still there. She did not recognize him, obviously, and then she looked at the photograph he had brought and did.

You spend your career with families in the worst weeks of their lives. You almost never find out how it turned out. That is the deal. One Saturday a year, we get to find out.

Ellery Nakamura, NICU charge nurse

The wall

Along one side of the lawn there is a board where families pin a photograph from the unit next to one from this year. It started by accident in 2016 when one mother brought both and asked if there was somewhere to put them.

It is now the busiest part of the afternoon, and it is where most of the staff end up standing.

Why it matters to the unit

Neonatal intensive care is unusual among specialties in how completely the story disappears. A patient leaves the unit at four weeks old and the people who kept them alive hear nothing further, ever, unless something goes wrong.

Staff turnover in NICUs nationally is among the highest in nursing. Winterfield's is not, and while nobody would claim an afternoon on a lawn explains that, the unit is clear that the reunion is not a public relations exercise. It is for the staff at least as much as for the families.

The reunion

  • First Saturday in March, on the lawn behind Winterfield Medical Center.
  • Open to any family whose child spent time in the Winterfield NICU, at any point since 1988.
  • 216 families attended in 2026.
  • No registration needed. Bring a photograph if you have one.
  • Organised by the unit's staff, on their own time, since 2011.

The 2027 reunion is on March 6.