The Victor Pinchuk Foundation will open the 33rd Neonatal Centre "Cradles of Hope" in Vinnytsia

In 2017, the Victor Pinchuk Foundation will open the 33^rd neonatal centre “Cradles oh Hope” in Vinnytsia. The centre will be created on the base of the Mykola Pyrohov Vinnytsia Oblast Clinical Hospital. Up-to-date neonatal equipment valuing UAH 4 500 000 million will be purchased for the Newborn Intensive Care Department.

This was reported by the Head of the Board of the Victor Pinchuk Foundation Thomas Weihe in Kyiv at the opening of the 8^th academic and practice conference for neonatologists, with the goal of making Ukrainian specialists familiar with the up-to-date trends in the preterm born babies nursery.

Thomas Weihe: “The Cradles of Hope project is one of the largest scale and longest lasting projects in which the Victor Pinchuk Foundation has been investing for more than 10 years, to modernise and transform the country. The Foundation is helping Ukraine provide the conditions for doctors to save the littlest and the most helpless citizens thanks to the top-notch equipment that we install at the neonatal centres. The Foundation wants every baby that is born to survive, grow healthy and have a chance to contribute to the building of the new country”.

The Vinnytsia Oblast Clinical Hospital hosts up to 50% of all preterm deliveries in the region. About 400 babies annually need intensive care and respiratory support. At present, the Newborn Intensive Care Department counts 5 beds that are critically insufficient to provide the full scope of help, especially to the category of newborn babies with a weight of 500 to 999 gram.

Tetiana Nalizhita, head of the Newborn Intensive Care Department at the Mykola Pyrohov Vinnytsia Oblast Clinical Hospital: “All women of the Vinnytsia Oblast having grave pathologies deliver at our department. That is to say, it is us who nurse small preterm infants and babies with congenital malformations. We hope that with the support of the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, we will succeed to equip new places at the Intensive Care Department and upgrade the existing ones”.

The high class medical equipment that the Foundation is going to supply will allow introducing up-to-date techniques of newborn nursing, and give wider professional possibilities for the specialists to provide emergency care to babies, it will bring its level closer to international standards and improve the survival rate among small preterm infants and the quality of their further lives.

Since June 2006, the Victor Pinchuk Foundation has opened 32 “Cradles of Hope” centres in Chernihiv, Volodymyrets (Rivne region), Rivne, Lutsk, Poltava (2 centres), Dnipro (2 centers), Kyiv (3 centers), Chernivtsi, Bakhchysarai, Izmail, Odesa, Simferopol (2 centres), Donetsk, Khmelnytsky (2 centres), Cherkasy, Kropyvnytsky, Ivano-Frankivsk, Zhytomyr, Kharkiv, Kherson, Mykolayiv, Ternopil, Sumy, Uzhgorod, Lugansk and Zaporizhzhia.

Over ten years of the programme operation, more than 400 000 infants have been born in partner hospitals, more than 60 000 newborn were patients of the intensive care centres "Cradles of Hope". According to doctors, 35 000 babies were saved thanks, among other factors, to the equipment supplied by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation. Total investment of the Victor Pinchuk Foundation into the "Cradles of Hope” since program launch amounts to UAH 90 000 000.