Sidra Medicine is delivering world-class care for newborns requiring major surgery in the region and beyond, data shows.
Sidra Medicine admits the sickest babies or those with complex health conditions, of which a very high proportion, 25 percent, undergo major surgery at the hospital.
Despite the complexities, survival rate of Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) patients at Sidra Medicine is high, according to the hospital’s annual report for 2021 released recently.
“As we reflect on the past year, we are immensely proud of our teams’ clinical achievements — whether it is saving the most vulnerable babies admitted to our neonatal ICU with a survival rate of 95.4 percent or ground-breaking surgeries to save the lives or limbs of our young patients,” said Mohammed Khalid Al Mana, Managing Director and Member of the Board of Governors at Sidra Medicine.
Sidra Medicine is part of the global Vermont Oxford Network database, which benchmarks more than 1,300 NICUs in the world, said the annual report.
Sidra Medicine has the only Level 4 neonatal intensive care unit in Qatar with more than 150 parameters monitored for each baby admitted.
Since January 2021, to avoid stressful situations for babies, ophthalmological interventions such as laser or eye injections are performed bedside in the NICU.
“We also have a Congenital Diaphragmatic Hernia Program which offers a full range of services from antenatal period to follow up after discharge. The program submits data for benchmarking and the outcomes match other well-established international centers. In 2021, six out of seven cases (86%) that received active care survived to discharge,” said the report.
“We have a number of Quality Improvement Projects within the NICU Division. In 2021, we revised more than 100 NICU guidelines, to ensure consistency and quality of care. A care bundle approach for ‘zero central line associated bloodstream infections’ was implemented. In 2021, the rate of infections decreased from 3.8 to 2.8 per 1000-line days,” it added.
A post discharge clinic was implemented in January 2021 to make sure that any baby discharged from the NICU is assessed by the NICU team a couple of days later. This is reassuring for the parents and improves safe discharge processes.
NICU staff are now trained in the Family and Infant Neurodevelopmental Education Program, which enables supportive developmental care to all the babies and their families. A key performance indicator of that approach is the breastfeeding rate at discharge. Breastfeeding is very challenging when babies are born preterm or are very sick.
Feeding babies with breastmilk at discharge is a marker of high engagement of the mothers.
The breastfeeding rate was 65 percent at discharge from NICU in 2021 (Optimum group), compared to 40-50 percent in similar NICUs in the USA.
The NICU at Sidra Medicine was also the only site in the Middle East to participate in a large multicentre clinical trial of premature infants with respiratory distress syndrome.
The study was conducted in thirty-three neonatal intensive care units in eleven countries. The results were published in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in December 2021.
This was one of the first randomised clinical trials to be conducted at Sidra Medicine. The study has implications for pioneering treatment in premature baby studies.
