Nurturing Hope: How Hushabye Nursery is Transforming Neonatal Care
In this episode of Phoenix Business Radio, host Karen Nowicki interviews Tara Sundem, Executive Director and Founder of Hushabye Nursery, about her journey as a neonatal nurse practitioner and the creation of her nonprofit to support families affected by the opioid crisis. Tara explains how Hushabye Nursery provides specialized care for substance-exposed newborns and their families, emphasizing the importance of dignity and compassion in aiding recovery and encouraging parents to seek help.
The conversation also explores the challenges of rethinking neonatal care and the financial hurdles of sustaining the nursery, which relies heavily on fundraising due to insufficient Medicaid support. Tara highlights the need for community backing to continue their work, sharing the nursery’s success in reducing hospital stays and improving family outcomes, with hopes for continued growth to break the cycle of addiction. 
Hushabye Nursery’s mission is to ‘embrace substance exposed babies and their caregivers with compassionate, evidence-based care that positively changes the course of their entire lives.’
Hushabye Nursery offers a safe and inclusive space where mothers, family members and babies – from conception through childhood – can receive integrative care and therapeutic support that offers each child the best possible life outcomes.
Programs offered include outpatient therapy in combination with prenatal and postpartum support groups and an inpatient nursery to care for babies that are born substance exposed during the withdrawal process.
Tara Sundem is a board-certified Neonatal Nurse Practitioner with more than 30 years of experience in neonatal intensive care. She was a frontline worker in the growing opiate epidemic, caring for the most innocent of its victims: Newborns suffering through opiate withdrawal – Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome (NAS).
Her passion to transform the healthcare experience for them and their families led her to found Hushabye Nursery, an Arizona non-profit dedicated to caring for opiate-exposed newborns in their first weeks of life. The 12-bed inpatient nursery opened its doors and its arms to these babies and their mothers in November 2020.
Under Tara’s leadership as Executive Director, Hushabye Nursery has grown from an idea to ‘save the babies’ in 2016, to a unique model of care for this underserved population that focuses on the family unit, both prenatal and postnatal.
Recognized as an industry leader on NAS, Tara has presented several community events on the topic. She received the 2021 Phoenix Business Journal Health Care Hero Award for Nursing and a 12 News Miracle Makers Award in 2021. She holds a Master of Science from Arizona State University and is a member of the National Association of Neonatal Nurses, the Academy of Neonatal Nurses, and the Neonatal Nurse Practitioners of AZ.
Tara lives in Gilbert with her husband, two sons and their dog.
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