Kangaroo Mother Care

A New Study Says We Can’t Prevent Most Preterm Births, So What Now?

Posted by

0


When Kate McCasland came into this world early almost 18 years ago, there was no global movement to reduce deaths of preterm babies. And the staff at the Texas hospital where she was born had never before tried the simple technique that her mom believes saved her life. But Saturday’s World Prematurity Day is all about getting that same technique and other high-impact care to the millions of preterm babies who need it most.

A new study out in The Lancet today makes it clear that training and equipping health workers to care for preterm babies is the key to saving the 1.1 million such babies who die every year. That’s because we still know very little about how to prevent babies from being born too soon. A distinguished research team led by Save the Children has found that even if the United States and other high-income countries did everything science currently tells us could help, the vast majority of these early births — 95 percent — would continue.

In contrast, good care at birth allows us to save 99 percent of the half-million preterm babies born in this country each year. And even in communities around the world where high-tech intensive care is not realistic and where most preterm deaths occur, low-tech, low-cost care could save 75 percent of these young lives. Now is the time to get that proven-effective, lifesaving care to the babies who will die without it.

Back to Kate in Texas. The simple technique that helped her could, by itself, save the lives of 450,000 preterm babies born in developing countries every year. In an interesting twist, Kate’s mom, Jane McCasland, actually learned about Kangaroo Mother Care one sleepless night while watching a late-night TV documentary set in Africa. Jane’s mind raced as she saw how the mother on TV was able to help her tiny baby survive by keeping the shirtless baby wrapped to her own bare skin.

When incubators are not an option, this technique gives tiny babies the warmth their own bodies have to fight so hard to produce. It also promotes breastfeeding, another proven lifesaver. But as Jane was to find out, there were less quantifiable benefits, too.

The next day she told the staff at the Harris Methodist Fort Worth Hospital that she wanted to try the kangaroo method, only to be told that the doctors thought Jane was too small to even try. But one night soon after, a trusted nurse came to Jane and told her that Kate was having a rough night in the incubator and that her heart rate was up above 200. “Now’s the time,” she told Jane.

“I have a feeling she was totally defying some doctor’s orders,” Jane recounts today. “But a mom holding her baby, it’s the most natural thing in the world. Her heartbeat dropped, and within about three minutes she was sound asleep. She gained an ounce that very night. When you’re talking about a baby who weighs 1 pound 7, that’s a lot.”

Jane believes her daughter survived thanks to Kangaroo Mother Care, “one gutsy nurse” and the medical team who quickly supported the method once they saw how effective it was. They learned from Kate’s case, applied that to helping other babies and eventually put the picture you see above on hospital literature promoting their use of Kangaroo Mother Care.

Jane brought Kate home on what should have been her due date, nearly four months after her birth. Now a high school senior, a driven and passionate Kate has become an advocate for newborn health around Texas and around the world. And she’s decided that she wants to become a neonatal nurse herself. She told her mom that it’s a nice way to say “thank you” to the health workers who saved her life.

Jane couldn’t be prouder of her daughter or more thankful to the team at Harris, so she has nominated them for a REAL Award, a first-of-its kind award initiative designed to honor health workers and their lifesaving work around the world.

“I still look back and think, ‘Oh my gosh, how did she make it?'” Jane says. “There were no egos. It wasn’t about them. It was about getting my daughter home, and you don’t forget people like that.”

This World Prematurity Day, Nov. 17, take a moment to celebrate health workers whose lifesaving work includes making sure babies born too soon are not born to die. Read about the global honorees and nominate an American health worker who has touched your life at www.TheRealAwards.com.

Souce: http://www.huffingtonpost.com

Fragile newborns survive against the odds.

Posted by

0

TAMALE, Ghana, 7 August 2012 – Awintirim Atubisa spent the first two months of his life tied to his mother’s chest in a cloth ‘pouch’, just like a baby kangaroo.  When he was born, six weeks premature, he weighed 1.3kg and was at risk of hospital-acquired infection, severe illness and respiratory tract disease.

But he survived, thanks to the UNICEF-supported Kangaroo Mother Care program.  The program encourages mothers to wrap their premature and underweight newborns to their chests using a ‘pouch.’  Snuggled against their mother’s skin, the babies’ body temperatures stabilise, their heart rates steady and they begin to breathe more easily.

Kangaroo Mother Care has been particularly successful in the Upper East and Central regions of Ghana, where babies who might have once died for want of an expensive incubator are now surviving.

Skin-to-skin care

Awintirim’s mother, Lydia Atubisa, says skin-to-skin contact, which is the cornerstone of Kangaroo Mother Care, calmed her baby son.

“When he was alone, he would start to shake and cry. But he becomes still as soon as I tie him to me and hold him. The heat of my body makes him feel like he is still in the womb,” she said.

Margaret Kugre, the nurse in charge of the program at the Upper East Regional Hospital, said that constant skin contact between mother and baby saves the lives of fragile babies in a region where incubators are scarce and unreliable. Before Kangaroo Mother Care was introduced in 2008, up to four tiny babies would have to share the maternity ward’s only incubator, which was often broken for months at a time.

Exclusive breast feeding is another key aspect of the program.  Babies are fed nothing but breast milk for the first six months of life, avoiding illnesses from contaminated water or breast milk substitutes.

The program encourages mother and baby to go home as soon as possible, to reduce the risk of hospital-acquired infection.  Lydia and her son were in the hospital for one month after the birth, but as soon as he was stable and gaining weight and she could confidently tie her cloth pouch and breastfeed, they moved back home to Sandema.  Awintirim and Lydia only return to the hospital for monthly weigh-ins.  At his latest check-up, six weeks after delivery, he weighed nearly 2kg.

In the first six months of 2011, 99 underweight babies were born in the Bolgatanga Municipal area in Ghana’s Upper East Region.  All were introduced to the Kangaroo Mother Care program and all survived.

Lydia is confident her son will become strong and she has big dreams for his future: “I want him to be a doctor so he can save lives, like the doctor who saved him.”

Culture adapts to new approach

The kangaroo program has been quickly adapted into Ghanaian culture. Ms. Kugre said mothers were happy to carry their newborns on their chests but nurses also involve a woman’s husband and mother-in-law.  “Carrying the baby on the back is preferred in Africa,” she said. “We work with the whole family so it is not so strange to them. In the ward, we wrap the babies onto the mother-in-law so she can feel what it’s like.”

Derek Bonsu, the Medical Superintendent at Saltpond Hospital in Central Region, said Kangaroo Mother Care empowers mothers. “They get to play an active role in the saving of their child. And no one monitors a vulnerable baby better than a desperate mother.”

Central Region also enjoys success

The program has saved hundreds of lives since it was introduced to the Central Region in 2008. Mr. Bonsu said premature and underweight babies were common and often died before Kangaroo Mother Care was introduced.

“We are in the middle of an area with social and economic problems. There is a lot of illiteracy and poverty, an early age of sexual initiation, a tradition of harmful practices, malnutrition… Mothers have had anaemia, malaria and other parasites and infections, all having an effect on the pregnancy, delivery, and health of the unborn baby. Many of the babies are born preterm or with too low a birth weight.  This should not be deadly, but we did not have a functioning incubator in the hospital and were losing the babies.”

The success of the program is clear. Before June 2008, 9 out of the 16 underweight babies born at the hospital died.  After the program started in June, all 12 babies born underweight lived.

Source: UNICEF