On World Prematurity Day, 445 preterm babies with their parents gathered at Rainbow Hospitals to celebrate and send a signal that preterm babies can survive and lead a normal life if good medical facilities were extended to them.
It’s a new record of so many preterm babies coming together breaking the earlier record of 386 babies who assembled in Argentina in 2012. Preterm babies are those born before 37 weeks of pregnancy.
IT Minister K.T. Rama Rao interacted with the children and their parents. Dinesh Kumar Chirla, Director of Newborn Intensive Care Services at Rainbow Hospitals, said that the hospital has saved well over 5,000 preterm babies, some of them were too small and critical to survive. Every child has the right to survive, he said, adding that the hospital has one of the largest neonatal intensive care units in the country.
Ramesh Kancharla, CMD of Rainbow Hospitals, said they could save more than 3,000 babies born less than 32 weeks and some were just 28 weeks old and as small as 449 grams.
Those survivors were now leading a normal life without any major disabilities. The hospital has over 200 neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) beds in Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka of which 100 beds are in Hyderabad.
Symposium
In another programme, the Government of Telangana in partnership with UNICEF held a State symposium on ‘Saving the Preterm Newborn’ to raise awareness on preterm babies.
Niloufer Hospital Superintendent Suresh Kumar said that the Hospital was the State nodal centre for newborn care and they have trained SNCU staff of all the districts on intervention like Kangaroo Mother Care and CPAP (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure) ventilation.
Yaron Wolman, Chief of Health, UNICEF India, said that World Prematurity Day is a key moment to focus global attention on the leading cause of deaths among under-five children – complications from preterm birth – that accounts for over one million deaths each year.
Some famous personalities who were born preterm are Sir Isaac Newton, Sir Winston Churchill, Mark Twain and Albert Einstein.
