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'The start was strange for me, but over time I got used to it,' he says. He had never seen mothers, much less fathers, use kangaroo care.

Inzuwe Rose learned the technique in the hospital's ward and brought the knowledge home with her when her daughter had reached 4 pounds and could be released. The son weighed over 4 pounds but the daughter weighed only 2.7 pounds, making her a strong candidate for kangaroo care. His wife, Inzuwe Rose, gave birth to twins. Not all kangaroo care starts in a hospital. 'It was what we had to do and it saved my child's life' These are the stories of the moms and dads – and babies – I met. In April 2022, I was able to interview and photograph a number of couples who have participated in the Ivory Coast's pilot program of kangaroo care at the Treichville hospital. 'The fathers see the importance of the close proximity of the babies to the mother's body,' he says. 'Programs like this can be adapted anywhere with dedicated and trained people,' say Lasme-Guillao.ĭads are being trained in the technique, too, according to Mark Vincent, UNICEF representative in Cote d'Ivoire. She believes kangaroo care is a perfect fit for Cote d'Ivoire because of the high infant death rate and the dearth of medical technology, including incubators. Berthe Evelyne Lasme-Guillao, associate lecturer of pediatrics at the Université Félix Houphouët-Boigny and head of the neonatology department at the CHU hospital in Yopougon. The new program is 'of critical importance in reducing the mortality of premature babies and can influence hospitals from the public to private sector in Cote d'Ivoire,' says Dr. Before the program, 60 to 70% of all the premature children that would come out of the NICU boxes would die.

'We knew about the program from its roots in Colombia.

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'There was a lot of death and lack of knowledge on how to take care of premature babies among the parents we were discharging, so we had to start this,' says Chantière. It's a pilot program to educate mothers and fathers in a technique not widely known in the country. This intensive care unit is under the guidance of pediatrician Dr. In the ward, referred to by the World Health Organization as a mother-infant ICU, the mother is available to the baby around the clock. In 2019 with the help of UNICEF, the University Hospital Medical Center at Treichville in Abidjan, the largest city in the country, opened its first kangaroo care ward. UNICEF, recognizing the potential of kangaroo care, began distributing information on the technique worldwide.Īccording to a study by the World Health Organization, starting kangaroo parental care immediately after birth has the potential to save up to 150,000 infant lives each year. They presented their results that year at a UNICEF conference: The babies in kangaroo care sleep more, and cry less, than those in incubators.

The researchers published their results in the 1983 Spanish language journal Curso de Medicina Fetal. The body warmth of a parent also helps control the baby's temperature. Kangaroo care works, researchers believe, because the infants pick up heartbeat and breathing rhythms from the parents' bodies, helping to stabilize their own heartbeat and breathing. The Colombian researchers found that parent-child snuggling had benefits similar to incubators. But resource-poor countries have precious few incubators, and babies were dying for lack of technology. They were hoping to find a way to reduce the country's high death rate for premature infants - approximately 70% at the time.įormerly, these premature babies were placed in incubators - when they were available - to control the infants' temperatures, provide an optimal amount of oxygen and keep them away from disturbing loud noise and bright lights. In 1978, physician researchers Edgar Rey Sanabria and Héctor Martínez-Gómez introduced the technique at the maternity ward of the San Juan de Dios Hospital in Bogota, Colombia. Youal Emmnual, 15, holds her daughter, Lucy, as she is put into a kangaroo care carrier.

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