With a view to informing anxious parents about the nature of treatment given to their newborns, particularly those with critical ailments or sickness at the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at the Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Government Hospital here, a live telecast facility was introduced on Tuesday.
The live telecast has been made possible through a mobile camera installed inside the NICU to enable authorised visitors watch the happenings inside the unit. An LED screen has been placed in a room adjacent to the unit for the visitors to monitor the activities taking place inside the NICU.
The hospital authorities have fixed a time schedule — noon to 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. — for parents and relatives of the infants to watch the course of treatment and other clinical procedures.
“This is to ensure transparency in the unit and satisfy the parents about the treatment given to their children. Moreover, this helps in preventing infection that could possibly be caused through carriers, including parents or other visitors,” said D. Saminathan, Head of the Department of Paediatrics of the hospital. Dr. Saminathan told presspersons at the hospital that the live telecast facility had been created at a cost of Rs. 2.5 lakh. The hospital, he said, catered to the needs of children from Tiruchi, Perambalur, Pudukottai, and Ariyalur districts.
The NICU is a tertiary care unit. All children weighing less than two kg were brought here for treatment, Dr. Saminathan said. Underweight children from private hospitals were brought to the unit for treatment.
Children with low birth weight, pre-term (born early), respiratory distress, jaundice, and neonatal seizures were admitted to the unit and treated. The unit had all facilities such as warmer, ventilator, Cbap, mobile x-ray and so on. Twenty five children could be treated at a time in the unit, he said.
K. Senthilkumar, Neo Natalogist, said that development follow up and Retinopathy Prematurity Treatment facilities were available at the hospital.
Parimala Devi, Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, said there was a mortality of 23 children out of 4,200 admitted to the hospital from April to October in 2013. But it had come down to 12 for 5,800 during the same period in 2014. Collector Jayashree Muralidharan, who inaugurated the facility, said Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Government Hospital was the third in the State to put in place a live telecast facility after the government hospitals in Salem and Dharmapuri.
