BEVERLY HILLS, CA / ACCESS Newswire / September 25, 2026 / Piya Saliba has spent time with the Cedars-Sinai NICU Parent Council, sitting with families in the first days after a baby is admitted. Those days are not the moment for long advice. They are the moment for someone to ask a short, useful question and then act on the answer.

That is the reasoning behind this list. Instead of another article about what NICU parents go through, Piya Saliba is encouraging people to try a plain list that a friend, relative, or coworker can use in the first week to figure out what to actually do.

"People want to help and they don't know where to start," Piya Saliba says. "A checklist takes the guessing out of it."

The self-check, for people outside the family

The list is built for the person standing just outside the situation: the coworker, the neighbor, the sibling who lives out of state. Five questions, meant to be asked directly to the family or answered honestly by the person asking them:

• Have I asked what they need this week, instead of assuming?
• Am I offering something concrete (a meal, a ride, an errand) instead of a general "let me know"?
• Have I checked whether they want visitors right now, or space?
• Am I following their lead on how much they want to talk about the baby's condition?
• Have I checked in again after the first week, when most other people have stopped?

Piya Saliba built the list around that last point in particular, and hopes people will hold onto it past the first few days. Attention tends to cluster around the beginning of a NICU stay. NICU stays often run longer than that, and the second and third weeks are where families report feeling most alone. She encourages anyone using the list to circle back around that point, even briefly.

What Piya Saliba hopes people will keep doing

Alongside sharing the list, Piya Saliba is naming two things she hopes to keep doing herself, tied to her continued work with the Cedars-Sinai NICU Parent Council, and inviting others to try the same.

The first is to keep the list updated based on direct feedback from parent council members, rather than treating it as a one-time document. She welcomes families and friends who try it to say what worked and what didn't.

The second is to keep showing up in the room. "A list is only useful if somebody is also there in person," Piya Saliba says. "The paper doesn't replace the visit." She encourages anyone using the list to treat it the same way, as a starting point rather than a substitute for showing up.

Where the list came from

Piya Saliba did not write this from a marketing brief. It came out of repeated conversations inside the parent council, where the same gaps kept surfacing: well-meaning people who wanted to help but asked the wrong question, or asked once and never again.

Her background sits outside medicine. She leads Fountain Capital as CEO, and her early years moved between Indonesia and Singapore before she studied at the University of Southern California. None of that is a credential for NICU work. What she brings instead is time spent listening to parents describe what helped and what didn't, and a habit of turning that into something usable rather than something written to sound compassionate.

How people can use the list

The self-check is available as a plain document, distributed through the Cedars-Sinai NICU Parent Council and shared directly with families who ask for it. There is no cost and no sign-up required. Piya Saliba encourages anyone who knows a family with a baby in the NICU to pick it up and try it before their next visit or phone call.

She is also encouraging workplaces to keep a copy on hand, since many people first hear that a colleague has a baby in the NICU through a manager or HR contact rather than the family directly.

"If a manager has this on their desk, they don't have to guess either," she says.

About Piya Saliba

Piya Saliba is CEO of Fountain Capital and lives in Beverly Hills, California. She is involved with the Nalin and Naseeb Foundation and serves on the Cedars-Sinai NICU Parent Council, where she works directly with families navigating neonatal care. Outside her professional and philanthropic work, she keeps up a longstanding interest in singing, acting, and dance.

Contact:

Info@piyasalibabeverlyhills.com

SOURCE: Piya Saliba