The inclusion of the family in care services for low birth weight babies

Abstract

Coping with difficulties due to lack of resources in Colombia's health sector took its doctors, in the second
half of the seventies, to adopt unusual measures, such as putting up to three babies within the same incubator,
which resulted in many deaths from cross-infection. In 1979, Drs. Rey and Martinez, from the San Juan de Dios
Hospital, in the city from Bogotá, had the idea of ​​taking advantage of their own bodies of mothers to warm their
low birth weight babies/ premature. UNICEF and its consultants, fortunately, managed to see in this last modality
of attention, which came to be called as Mother Kangaroo, advantages that went beyond the question of survival in
poor countries. Today, research carried out in several developed countries and in development point out that this
form of attention to the premature baby is safe, advantageous and viable.