Kokrokoo Charities Foundation has installed its 10th incubator at the Cape Coast Teaching Hospital (CCTH) to help save the lives of premature babies.

Preterm death has been high at the Hospital within the past seven years and the third highest at the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), authorities of the CCTH told the GNA.

Factors being ascribed to the situation include insufficient incubators and lack of space at the hospital, which had not seen any expansion since it was converted from a Regional Hospital to a Teaching Hospital in 2013.

Total admissions at the NICU from January to June this year were 406 of which there were 166 preterm babies.

Fifty out of the 166 preterm babies died within the same period despite the three incubators functioning at the Hospital at the time.

The Central Region is said to have the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in the country.

The incubator, which was presented by Mr Kwame Sefa Kayi, an Accra-based Radio Presenter and Founder of the Kokrokoo Charities Foundation, would, therefore, go a long way to help save many infant lives at the Hospital.

“When it comes to child birth, we should have less reports or fewer or probably zero reports of infant mortality due to the unavailability of incubators,” Mr Sefa Kayi said when he presented the over 10,000 dollar incubator to Dr Eric Ngendu, the Medical Director of the Hospital.

Mr Sefa Kayi said: “We are just doing our little bit the in service to our God and to our country, hoping that this will impact positively on lives”.

He said the Foundation would next install three other incubators at the Koforidua Government Hospital in the Eastern Region and two in hospitals in the Volta Region.

Dr Ngendu, on behalf of the CCTH, thanked the Foundation for donating the incubator, which would argument the number of lives of babies to be saved.

He appealed to corporate Ghana to help the Hospital to build a new spacious Neonatal Intensive Care to cater for the many cases the hospital receives.

Madam Veronica Koomson, the Principal Nursing Officer in charge of the NICU, said the incubator would help augment the three other incubators currently functioning at the Hospital.

Under the “Giving hope to mothers, Keeping Children Alive” slogan, the Kokrokoo Foundation had been installing incubators as part of an on-going fund-raising campaign for the purchase of 100 incubators desperately needed in NICUs of health facilities nationwide.

The incubators are to help cater for babies born before 37 weeks of
pregnancy, known in medical terms as pre-term deliveries.