A special event to mark the World Prematurity Day (November 17) took place on Wednesday at the Da Nang Maternity and Pediatrics Hospital to honour the contributions made by health workers in newborn care as well as to raise public awareness of the challenges surrounding preterm birth.

The event was jointly held by the hospital, the Department of Maternal and Child Health of the Vietnamese Ministry of Health, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) with support from the Kimberly-Clark.

With the theme ‘Zero Separation. Act now! Keep parents and babies born too soon together’, this year’s World Prematurity Day was an opportunity to advocate for every parent’s right to have unrestricted access to their babies in the hospital, no matter where and when.

According to UNICEF, preterm birth is the leading cause of death in children under five. It is estimated that 17,000 children die within their first 28 days and 103,500 babies are born preterm annually in Viet Nam.

The neonatal mortality accounted for 59% of deaths in children aged under five and 70.4% in children aged under one.

The causes of infant mortality are preterm/low birth weight, asphyxia, trauma during delivery, malformations and infections, in which the cause of preterm/low birth weight accounts for 25%.

These causes can be prevented by such simple measures as periodic antenatal check-ups for timely detection of risks, making the good use of nutrition, reasonable exercise/labour regimes for pregnant women, early and exclusive breastfeeding, balanced care for premature/low-birth-weight babies with Kangaroo care, a method of holding a baby that involves skin-to-skin contact.

Compared with 2010, the maternal mortality rate decreased from 69/100,000 to 46/100,000 and the under-5 child mortality rate fell down from 24.1/1,000 to 21.0/1,000 in 2019.

Within 10 years (from 2010 to 2019), hundreds of thousands of children under 5 years of age were saved.

Reporting by PHAN CHUNG – Translating by A.THU