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| Kangaroo Mother Care (KMC) |
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| Kangaroo Mother Care requires the mother to hold her newborn infant tied to her chest in a 24-hour skin-to-skin contact, the way a kangaroo keeps its young one in a pouch after it is born. |
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| Kangaroo Mother Care is currently practiced in developing countries like Colombia, the Philippines and South Africa. Fernandez Hospital is a pioneer of Kangaroo Mother Care in Andhra Pradesh. The concept is gaining increasing acceptance by new parents. |
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| Babies with a low birth weight (LBW), need extra special care, which is initially provided as intensive care in a critical care unit, but once they stabilize most LBW babies just need to be kept warm. |
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| Conventionally, babies are kept warm in an incubator where they were completely cut off from their mothers for days. In KMC the babies are tied to their mother's chest with a special strap. This skin to skin contact keeps as warm as they would be in an incubator. Additionally it makes them physiologically more stable, enables them to bond better with their mothers, have fewer serious infections, go home sooner, and breastfeed better and longer. Studies have shown that KMC babies catch up with their normal growth rate faster than babies kept in an incubator. |
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| Fernandez Hospital has a special ward devoted to KMC where mothers of low birth weight are initiated into Kangaroo Mother Care. |
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