Help Babies in Bangladesh See

Seeing the premature babies in Singapore receive timely treatment for their eyes tells me how fortunate we are. In Bangladesh, 25,000 of the 3.75 million infants born each year are preemies, and this puts them at risk of retinopathy of prematurity. With your donations received so far, we will be able to carry out mainly two critical actions.

Introduce ROP screening and treatment services outside Dhaka: Orbis Bangladesh program team will use its experience and lessons learned from ROP screening and treatment service project currently implanted through Ispahani Islamia Eye Institute & Hospital (IIEI&H) in Dhaka city. The project has created a huge demand for expansion of ROP service outside Dhaka city.

Orbis will collaborate with its strong and long term partner CEITC and DECF to introduce ROP services: This hospital has the surgical and medical retina service and has some gaps to provide ROP services. They have also very good relationship with 3-4 NICUs/SCANUs and are willing to collaborate with selected hospitals with Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU)s/Special Care Newborn Unit (SCANU) s in Chittagong city.  At the initial stage, an assessment will be carried out to know the Neo Natal Care services at the public and private hospitals. We will train doctors so that they can screen and treat ROP cases.

Create Awareness: Most doctors and parents are not aware of the severity of ROP and many babies go needlessly blind. Bangladesh is in urgent need of trained, experienced nurses and proper equipment to screen and treat these babies. We will organize orientation for neonatologist, gynaecologist, patricians and staff of Neo Natal Intensive care unit so that they can easily identify babies with ROP and refer for treatment. 100 doctors and nurses will be oriented. We will also organize campaign using Media and Community Radio to reach more babies in need of eye care services.

Thank you for being part of the babies’ journey.

Gratefully,

Elaine

Links:

• ROP in Bangladesh