Strengthening medical care for newborns is a priority for the Cuban health system. Despite the complex economic situation faced by the health sector in 2023, priority is given to such care and comfort in the services related to the Neonatology specialty at Lenin Hospital, whose expansion is being completed.
According to Dr. Sara Liz Ricardo Suárez, deputy director of the hospital, “this intervention will allow us to locate all the departments covered by Neonatology in the same room. For example, we have a small skin-to-skin room for low weight, at-risk infants who need to be with their mothers, which is currently outside Neonatology.
“As part of the expansion, this will be included in the new Neonatology service. This work allows us to provide greater structural coverage for the management of critically ill patients, with the Neonatology intensive care unit. It also includes the sterilization center and the breast milk bank, all in the same unit, which will make it possible for the service to function better, avoid overcrowding and provide it with better working conditions” at Lenin Hospital.
In this sense, the specialist in Internal Medicine also mentioned that when an investment or a repair process is carried out, we think of the patients, who are the priority, “but secondly we take care of the working conditions of our specialists, the comfort for their rest, that they have a pantry, a place for the discussion of cases and a comfortable space to be able to carry out their assistance work. Hence the modifications in the conception of this new Neonatology service”.
In addition to taking in underweight newborns and those with other life-threatening conditions, it also provides assistance to newborns with congenital malformations from the entire eastern region and Camagüey who require surgery, who are stabilized at birth and transferred to the Regional Neonatal Surgery Center, located at the Pediatric Hospital.
In this regard, Ricardo Suarez said that “those pregnant women who were detected with some malformation in their babies and require emergency treatment, are also hospitalized at the institution. Pregnant women from Las Tunas, Guantánamo, Santiago de Cuba, Granma and Camagüey come to the Lenin, so those children are born here and receive emergency surgery”.
“The days are very difficult and we go home with a lot of worries, which forces us to reinvent a new strategy every day. But when we see the result, which goes beyond an indicator, we understand that within those numbers there is a lot of effort. What is really important is the life saved”, concluded the doctor.
The Neonatology specialty was one of the nine evaluated by the National Accreditation Board this year, in coordination with the University of Medical Sciences of Holguin, meritorious results that made it worthy of the proposal of an Excellence evaluation.
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