Entities spotlight premature births
During the event, pregnant women were urged to follow a healthy lifestyle, including not smoking, drinking alcohol or using illegal drugs during pregnancy.
November is Prematurity Awareness Month. In light of this, the Department of Health, in collaboration with various stakeholders in the health sector, hosted a hybrid World Prematurity Awareness event on November 22 at The Lakes Hotel and Conference Centre.
The event formed part of the department’s sustained efforts to end preventable preterm births by ensuring pregnant women have full-term pregnancies and healthy babies.
In support of mothers raising premature neonates, the department gave recipients from Benoni, Daveyton and other surrounding areas gift packs for their babies.
During the informative event, it was revealed that about 15m or one in 10 babies globally are born preterm each year. In SA, an average of 15% or one in seven babies of all births are born prematurely annually.
The department said about 84 000 preterm infants are born in SA each year, and 10% of premature infants are at increased risk of death and various other complications, including respiratory, neurological and eye morbidities compared with full-term infants.
According to Professor Sithembiso Velaphi of the University of Witwatersrand and a Chris Hani Baragwaneth Hospital medical doctor, World Prematurity Day is a day to raise awareness about the challenges and burdens of preterm births.
“World Prematurity Day also increases awareness of preterm births and the deaths and disabilities due to prematurity. When it comes to challenges in assessing gestational age, accessing the last menstrual period is not always accurate, and it depends on the mother’s memory.”
MomConnect
Velaphi said about 70% of pregnant women SA attend antenatal care before 20 weeks and 47% in the first trimester.
Some factors associated with prematurity-related deaths, he added, include insufficient nurses on duty to manage the patient adequately, inadequate facilities or equipment in neonatal units, lack of accessible neonatal ICU beds with a ventilator and poor adherence to infection prevention and control practices.
The department, working with various stakeholders, has developed strategies, programmes and other interventions to effectively manage complications and prevent avoidable deaths linked to prematurity in the country.
These strategies include award-winning MomConnect, a cellphone-based technology with over 4.5m subscribers developed to support pregnant women with health promotion messages translated into official languages to improve their health and that of their infants.
Antenatal
The other intervention is an Early Childhood Development radio campaign called Side-by-Side, which reaches about 5.7m people weekly through 11 SABC African language radio stations and social media platforms.
Meanwhile, the department urges all pregnant women to access antenatal as early as possible and to follow a healthy lifestyle, including not smoking, drinking alcohol or using illegal drugs during pregnancy.
This will reduce the risk of preterm labour and premature birth, which is the leading cause of death in children under the age of five.
Pregnant women are also advised to attend all antenatal care visits or appointments throughout their pregnancy periods to enable health professionals to monitor and assess the state of health of the mother and unborn to identify early signs and symptoms of manageable and life-threatening complications such as pre-eclampsia, urinary tract infections and gestational diabetes.
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