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15th December, 2015
The Bangalore chapter of the Selflessly Yours Initiative today launched a unique program of its kind in the Satya Sai MultiSpeciality Hospital.
A small team of members from Selflessly Yours were permitted to enter the Cardio and Neuro wards of the hospital where complex surgeries are performed by top doctors of the city completely free of charge. The patients to benefit are from all over India, essentially underprivileged children and adults from remote villages of India and who prove their inability to afford these life changing cardiac and neuro surgeries.
A sharp increase in postsurgical infections and complications was seen in the case of young children who have waited so long to get operated upon for serious life threatening cardiac and neurological issues.
In order to help with this issue, I thought of adding this activity to the Bangalore chapter of Selflessly Yours. Our goal was to impart hygiene counselling to caretakers of the children scheduled for pediatric cardiac surgery.
The focus was to talk to caretakers of pediatric patients and make them aware of the importance of washing hands, hygiene instructions to be followed in the hospital before surgery and post surgical instructions to be followed at home so that the child can recover quickly and lead a normal childhood.
As simple as it may sound, the nurses and doctors confirmed with us that this initiative was extremely helpful to them as medical professionals and they are very confident that they would see a sharp decline in the rate of post surgical complications in pediatric patients.
The information was shared with mothers and fathers of little children getting ready for surgery in a week or two. Some key points emphasized in addition to many more were about washing hands, eating hot freshly prepared food , wearing clothes that were washed thoroughly and dried in the sun, not allowing too many visitors postsurgery and care of hair, teeth and body before surgery.
We shared pictures and communicated in Hindi and Kannada.
We did make an impact because children explaining hygiene to mothers of other children has a unique effect on its own. It was interesting to see parents with a variety of emotions such as hope, happiness, fear, worry and apprehension. It was even more heartwarming to see happy children waiting for their turn for surgery after which they could lead a carefree childhood just like their peers and siblings.
One particular memory that stuck in our minds was that of a 3 month old baby and a worried mother waiting with a prayer on her lips.
Thank you
Simran Pahuja
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