Manila hospital is RP’s ‘baby factory’

Every day at the Dr. Jose Fabella Memorial Hospital in Sta. Cruz, Manila, dozens of women can be found lying on the floor, their new-born babies wrapped in a pouch of cloth and strapped to their chest.

Some 70 to 100 babies are born every day at the 700-bed maternity hospital, around 15 of them premature or with a low birth-weight. So, with only 14 incubators at the hospital and the weakest children needing several days’ stay, incubator space is at a premium.

With no money to buy new incubators, the hospital five years ago began using the so-called "Kangaroo Mother Care" method which involves putting only the very weakest babies in mechanical incubators and swaddling the rest with their mothers.

Pioneered by a hospital in Bogota, Colombia, in 1979, the method has spread around the developing world, being used in hospitals in some 40 countries, and is being seriously looked at in the United States and in Europe.

Since the program was adopted in 1999, the Fabella hospital has seen a dramatic 30 percent fall in deaths among low birth-weight babies, said Dr. Socorro Mendoza, who heads the program.

The babies’ heartbeat and temperature remain much more stable when they are with their mothers and they tend to gain weight faster and go home a lot quicker than those in incubators, she said. The human incubators feed and stimulate the babies, which the mechanical ones cannot do.

The results of the program have been so positive that the hospital has now begun training seven other government hospitals in Metro Manila in the method, Mendoza said.

Improving child health care is considered crucial in this country of 84 million people, where the infant mortality rate stands at 19.7 per 1,000 live births. In most developing countries 17 out of 1,000 babies born alive die within the first few weeks of life, according to data published in the Manila-based Medical Observer.

The predominantly Roman Catholic country has one of the highest population growth rates in Asia averaging 2.3 percent annually which is around 5,000 births a day.

Many of these babies are premature low-weight babies which, according to the World Health Organization’s definition, are babies born weighing less than 2.5 kilos, or 5.5 pounds.

"Caring for these babies puts a tremendous strain on the public health system of poor countries like the Philippines," Mendoza told AFP.

"In developed countries these babies are put in incubators, which are expensive and remain in the neo-natal intensive care unit for months.

"What makes the Kangaroo Mother Care program such a godsend for countries like ours is that we simply go back to nature at very little cost.

"Like the marsupial the program is named after, baby and mother should be together as one," she said. — AFP