New York City’s public hospitals are launching a $3 million effort to simulate high-tech wombs for premature babies.
The initiative includes low lights and special sound monitors that flash when a neonatal unit gets too noisy for its tiny patients. City Health and Hospitals Corp. President Alan Aviles says the improvements are designed to let the infants “eat, sleep and develop as though they never left their mother’s womb prematurely.”
The project is being formally announced Wednesday. The agency aims to make the changes in all 11 of its neonatal centers by the end of 2009.
Officials hope the initiative will help premature infants develop more quickly. About 5,500 infants were born prematurely or critically ill in city-run hospitals last year. They represented almost one-fourth of all the hospitals’ births.
(Source: 1010WINS)
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3 Responses
A quarter… seems a little too high to me.
Too high? Which med school did you graduate from? What’s your clinical experience? Yes, a quarter of births is correct for hospitals that are city run b/c (inner city) residents typically do not recieve the proper prenatal care, and tend to have heigher premature labor rates.
Anyway, this is fabulous. Univ of MD has an ELBW and VLBW facility in their NICU from these types of grants and the success rates are phenomenal, these poor little babies blood pressure goes up if you so much as talk too loudly by their incubators, so that sound alarm sounds like a great idea.
When NY nicu facilities upgrade, the entire frum community stands to benefit.
i wasn’t questioning the accuracy of the statistic. i meant it is a little shocking that a full quarter of births are premature. however if you count all teenage pregnancies and low level of health education, as well as smoking and drugs and alcohol during pregnancy in the inner city i guess that’s not so surprising.