K.H.M.H Neonatal Unit, Saving Babies One at a Time
Each year, since 2011, November seventeenth has been observed as World Prematurity Day. This year, the day will be celebrated with the theme: Small Actions, Big Import: Immediate Skin-to-Skin Care for Every Baby Everywhere. The occasion gives visibility to the problem of premature births and to raise awareness of the needs and rights of premature babies and their families. It is in this light that the K.H.M.H. opened its doors for our cameras this evening to bring you insight on the level of care that they have been providing not only to neonatal babies, but other newborns that have been born with complications over the years. News Five’s Marion Ali reports.
Marion Ali, Reporting
On Friday, the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at the Karl Heusner Memorial Hospital will hold a forum at the Lion’s Den with parents of babies who have passed through its doors over the years. The purpose of the occasion is to see how those babies have progressed over that time. Some of them are now high school students, while others have also moved on to also become parents. They were cared for by the country’s only neonatal unit at the K.H.M.H.
Neroli Williams
Nurse Neroli Williams, Unit Manager, N.I.C.U., K.H.M.H
“This is the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. It’s the only one in the country. We care for all babies from 0 to 29 days, 28 days. It’s neonatal, so it’s from 0 to 28 days, and we get babies from all over the country because the other hospitals don’t have any intensive care for neonates. So all premature babies, most babies with deformities or any problem after birth, they come here. The baby is premature, so the lung is the last thing to develop. And if that’s not developed, we have what we call the artificial surfactant. So we give that, but in order to do that, we have to incubate them, put them on a mechanical ventilator so that machine actually breathes for the baby. We monitor them with the cardiac monitor, all their infusions with different medications. We usually monitor through pumps as well that they get adequate for the daily requirements.”
The unit comprises three sections: the third provides the most intensive care for neonates and newborns who are critical and or require surgery or ventilation. Section two is for observing how they feed and for skin to skin contact with the neonates – an important part of their survival and progress. The first section allows the neonates time to gain weight before they go home. And according to Nurse Neroli Williams, the Manager at the K.H.M.H Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, premature births are on the rise in Belize. For this year already, the unit has seen around three hundred of them.
Nurse Neroli Williams
“So far this year, we only managed to lose like 12 percent of all of our preterm babies, and some of them are this year so far. So we had 87 point something survival for the premature babies.”
Marion Ali
“What’s causing that, premature births?”
Nurse Neroli Williams
“Well, premature birth could – a lot of things could contribute: the lifestyle, clinic, we have some people that don’t attend clinics. And then again, a lot of mothers have diabetes and hypertension, which contributes as well. If they don’t attend clinic, then they don’t take their prenatal vitamins, or some of them don’t know that they’re pregnant ‘til later on in pregnancy; we have a lot of very young mothers, teenagers, 14, 15.”
Williams says that neonates that weigh less than one point seven pounds at birth have a slimmer chance at survival than those that weigh more. One month-old Mateo was not born a neonate, but had complications that required him to spend that first month of his life in the unit. His father, Jose Flores was beside himself to learn that his son could go home for the first time today.
Jose Flores
Jose Flores, Father of Newborn
“We had complications and his birth and he is still probably the doctor says dead. All his organs didn’t work. And now he’s [been] one month here, but now it’s perfect.”
Marion Ali
So the organs are now functioning and cooperating?
Jose Flores
“Yeah, absolutely. Everything’s working. The doctors did a great, great, absolutely great job. Nobody thought that he would live. But now, thank God, and what the doctors did, and the nurses, he is living, right.”
Marion Ali
“So when does he leave?”
Jose Flores
“Today, today he’s leaving. I am so excited, nervous. I don’t know what I need to do. My wife is inside, but yeah, we are really, really happy.”
Marion Ali for News Five.
