In the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) at El Camino Health, Dr. Malathi Balasundaram has made a quiet rule for herself: she doesn’t respond when a colleague refers to “the baby in room number” or “a term baby with seizures.” “Every baby has a name,” she says, “and using it reminds us that our patients are people. Naming them humanizes our care and grounds us in why compassion matters.”

That conviction runs through her work as a neonatologist, a clinical professor at the Stanford School of Medicine, and the founder of the internationally recognized Family-Centered Care Taskforce. She defines compassionate care in the NICU as “holding space for both hope and fear at the same time.” It means asking families how much information they want before sharing survival statistics, and it means staying with a family when a baby does not go home. “Simply being present — holding a family’s hands in silence — is another profound form of compassionate care,” she says.

Her focus is family-centered care, a model that treats parents as essential partners rather than visitors. “Compassionate care means seeing the person as a whole,” she says. “In my practice, that means seeing the infant and their family together, beyond a diagnosis, and listening deeply while responding with kindness, dignity, and understanding.”

Since 2017, she has voluntarily led these efforts at El Camino’s NICU, where she chairs the Family-Centered Care Committee through multidisciplinary collaboration. Among the committee’s offerings is a reading program, which provides families with the invaluable opportunity to bond with their infants through shared stories, even in their most fragile and uncertain moments. This initiative reflects her deep understanding of the emotional needs of NICU families and her belief that healing extends beyond clinical care.

Her compassion doesn’t stop at the family’s side. The NICU is a high-acuity, high-stress place, and carrying families’ stories takes an emotional toll on the people who work there, Dr. Balasundaram and her colleagues included. So she extends that care to the team: checking in after a difficult delivery or a code, offering a colleague a moment to step away, expressing gratitude. “Caring for our peers sustains us and allows us to continue caring for our patients and their families,” she says.

Through collaboration with her colleagues and past NICU families, Dr. Balasundaram helped create a peer support program for current NICU families, reinforcing a cycle of partnership and improvement. The Family Partnership Council she nurtured has grown to 52 parent voices, including bereaved parents, and ten parent mentors, ensuring that no parent navigates their difficult journey alone. A former NICU parent who joined the mentorship program says of Dr. Balasundaram, “She helped me find hope when I lost it and nurtured my purpose once I found it.”

Her reach extends well beyond her own hospital. After building a program locally, she surveyed early-career neonatologists and found that 65% of the 48 respondents had no formal family-centered care initiatives. In response, she founded the non-profit Family-Centered Care Taskforce, which now counts more than 3,800 members. She leads it as a volunteer, with equal representation of clinicians and former NICU families in its leadership to strengthen family-centered neonatal care in global NICUs.

The families she has cared for describe the effect of her compassion. One parent wrote that her “calm, kind, thorough and tailored” presence brought “a sense of complete trust and reassurance.” Another thanked her for taking photographs of their son and for giving them the chance “to hold and spend time with him… precious moments we’ll cherish forever.”

One former NICU parent wrote of Dr. Balasundaram’s care: “I hope you know that when we tell the story of our family, our experience, and how we fought the hardest battle of our life, we’ll always speak of your kindness, your dedication, and the difference that you made. You will always be part of our story.”