Kangaroo Method Helps in the Recovery of Baby Born Weighing Less Than 600 Grams
It was more than two months and then over 20 days in the Intermediate Care Unit - including 6 days in the Kangaroo Unit - at Santa Casa
Little Maria Virginia was born on May 1st of this year, in an emergency surgery after her mother, Marina Chaves, experienced complications due to high blood pressure during pregnancy. With 10 weeks left to be considered mature for birth and weighing only 588 grams, the girl was classified as extremely premature and had to go straight from the delivery room to an ICU, says her mother, Marina.
"She stayed in the ICU for more than two months and then over 20 days in the Intermediate Care Unit, with 6 days in the Kangaroo Unit. Since the ICU, the nurses were already teaching me how to take care of her. And now, I feel very happy because we are going home and she is already breastfeeding," says Marina.
All the assistance that Maria Virginia received at Santa Casa do Pará since her birth is recommended by the Kangaroo Method, a set of practices for humanized and comprehensive care for low birth weight newborns (NB), which involves the active participation of the family at all stages of the process, from high-risk pregnancy to hospital discharge and outpatient follow-up. Its pillars include early and prolonged skin-to-skin contact, support for breastfeeding, family support, and individualization of care, contributing to the stability of the baby and the physical and emotional development of everyone involved.
Dr. Roseana Sovano, a neonatologist at the Kangaroo Intermediate Care Unit at Santa Casa do Pará, monitored part of Maria Virginia's progress and, along with other members of the multidisciplinary team that cared for the girl, celebrated her discharge last week.
"Discharging a baby with the characteristics of Maria Virginia is truly a great victory, because only the extreme prematurity and the extremely low weight she was born with, weighing 588 grams, already bring a very difficult prognosis for the child. So for us, as professionals, it is really a great challenge to overcome. In fact, the entire team deserves congratulations for having managed to overcome these barriers related to prematurity," said the doctor, who exemplifies some of the challenges faced daily in providing care to premature babies born at Santa Casa.
"It's a little body that comes out here before its time. It's an immature brain, an immature lung, an immature intestine, and an immature heart. And everything we do here is in an attempt to simulate as much as we can how it should develop inside the mother's womb. And when we manage to do this successfully outside, it is indeed a great victory," she emphasizes.
Until June of this year, there were 300 admissions of low birth weight newborns in the Kangaroo Intermediate Care Unit at Santa Casa.
