When buying baby shower gifts, or for any holiday for that matter, I always ask sales associates if they know of any products that give back or donate a portion of their proceeds to charity. Surprisingly, the answer is always ‘No’. We’ve decided to put together a list of baby products that give back…to different organizations including Embrace! So hereare some of Embrace’s favorite products –
Our exciting and first corporate partner, Million Dollar Baby (MDB)has committed to helping Embrace because children are their priority. But many children around the world are less fortunate. Some precious babies might never have a proper place to sleep, much less a safe and stylish nursery. This is why MDB has committed to giving back – back to the children of the Embrace. Partnering with Embrace allows MDB to support an organization that touches infant’s lives but also families and communities around the world.
One of the many ways Million Dollar Baby has shown its support for Embrace is through the development of their Snuggle Wrap. A modern day swaddle blanket that was inspired by the actual Embrace warmer. Even more exciting is that for the entire month of July, MDB has offered an exciting promotion for Embrace readers only that provides 20% off the Snuggle Wrap. Just use promotion code EMBRACEBABY at check out.
MDB has contributed a generous $10,000 donation and are also donating a portion of the proceeds from their Babyletto line to Embrace. MDB has two new stylish products – The Nara and Kyoto Gliders. Both are modern versions of a rocking chair, sleek and simple. Both are made of a water-repellent and stain-resistant microsuede, perfect around babies, and are detailed with a hand-sewn piping accent with a solid wood base. Beautiful furniture that gives back.
Saffron Press has debuted their next book, Dreams of Hope. Inspired by global mantras of peace, the book takes a father and his daughter on a dream journey that explores the beauty of the world. The book teaches children the importance of acceptance through teaching the word ‘goodnight’ in multiple languages, showcasing a travel guide of world peace monuments, and also includes a keepsake feature page to record dreams of hope for children. A portion of its proceeds benefits Embrace.
Skip Hop’s products are ridiculously adorable. They have matching animal toys, and bathtime and mealtime friends that are great for children’s gifts. Check out the backpacks that are BPA and PVC free, particularly the cutest Bee, Penguin, and Owl designs. A portion of its sales benefits charities that give back to parents and children including the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, Baby Buggy, and the Ovarian Cancer Research Fund.
Lastly, Toms shoes. A pioneer in the buy one, give one space, Toms shoes are super comfortable, come in practically any color, are affordable, AND for every pair you purchase, Toms will give a pair of new shoes to a child in need. Since 2006, Toms has given over 150,000 pairs of shoes to children around the world. Its new faux lace up and nautical inspired shoes are cute enough to buy on their own, but I can also help buy shoes for a child too. Similar to Saffron’s Dreams of Hope book, Toms aims to inspire a generation that will grow up with the idea of giving and philanthropy as a standard in their livelihood.
To finish up Premature Infant Awareness Month, we have a special guest blog post by Dr. Saudamini Nesargi who is helping us with our clinical trials at St. John’s Hospital in Bangalore, India.
Temperatures in Bangalore have dropped in the last few days and most of us enjoy it. We drink something warm, wear woolen clothes and keep the doors and windows closed. If not, we shiver hope the sun starts shining again soon. But what if you a were little premature baby who could do none of these things…not even shiver to keep yourself warm?What if you had to rely completely on others and often inadequate resources just to keep warm?
This unfortunately is the situation for one third of all babies born in India. We have an additional problem, not only of preterm babies, but also of babies born at term whose weight is so low, they simply do not have the required amount of fat to insulate them to keep them warm.
I work in the neonatal intensive care unit of a tertiary hospital in Bangalore and a few days ago a baby arrived in the emergency room with a temperature of 33 degrees centigrade. (Almost 4 degrees below normal). He was 1200g, born 12 weeks preterm and had treatable congenital anomalies requiring immediate surgery. He was just hours old and had traveled across two states in a bus just to reach us.
He picked up an infection on the way, was bleeding due to liver damage, and was barely breathing- all because of hypothermia. All this meant a delay in surgery, increased cost because of longer hospital stay and sadly for the little boy-his parents did not have the means to continue treatment and he was taken back home- untreated.
This is about just one baby and I wish he were the exception rather than the rule. Most babies coming to us from other hospitals come from significant distances and come hypothermic. This instantly puts them at a higher risk of mortality even with the best of treatment that we have to offer. What they need is something to keep them warm. Something simple, which works well, without electricity, is affordable and easy to use.
The first five months of my pregnancy were smooth and without incident. At a routine check up at 22 weeks, my physicians and the ambulatory technicians conducting my exam discovered that I was a few hours away from being dilated and going into pre-term labor. If delivered, it would have been extremely unlikely that our daughter would have survived. I was immediately admitted into the hospital. The next morning, I had surgery conducted by one of New York City’s leading maternal-fetal medicine specialists to promote the duration of my pregnancy.
Afterward, the obstetricians guiding my care advised me to take it easy to ensure my pregnancy would last as long as possible. With optimism, positive energy, and a team of clinicians monitoring my pregnancy, we made it to nearly 36 weeks. My daughter was born exactly one month before her due date, weighing 6 pounds and measuring nearly 20 inches. My husband and I were thrilled and relieved that she was in good enough health and weight to avoid admission to the neonatal intensive care unit. We all went home together two days after she was born.
Without dedicated obstetricians, maternal-fetal medicine specialists, ambulatory technicians, and nurses skilled in high-risk pregnancies and deliveries, my daughter probably would not have had the smooth entry into the world that she did. My husband and I are immensely grateful for the high quality care, attention and nurture she received from a team of people trained to promote the survival of newborns. Now 20 months old, our daughter is a reminder of the incredible medical care we were lucky enough to be afforded and drives our commitment to ensure all mothers, fathers and newborns around the world have the same access.
We’ve asked a few Embrace supporters to share stories of their child’s birth to help highlight the fact that prematurity is still a major issue in America, and around the world. Most of us in America are lucky enough to have world-class neonatal care, but as March of Dimes notes, more newborns die from premature birth than from any other cause. Embrace hopes to reduce neonatal mortality and morbidity, please help is spread the word!
Toby’s Story
On November 01, 2008, for no apparent reason and with no time to prepare our son was born three and half months early, Toby, was born at 25 weeks at a U.K. hospital. He weighed 1 pound and 14 oz or 860g. He was transferred to a specialist hospital where he was cared for in a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit for the first three months of his life. When we arrived at the ICU unit, it was very daunting, but the presence of medical specialists and modern medical equipment was very reassuring for us.
The hours passed and we started to comprehend the implications of his early arrival. As he lay in his incubator for treatment and warmth, there was a constant stream of various doctors and nurses tending to his needs. Toby was tiny, but he often had something attached to every limb for all the different drugs. He needed to receive multiple medical interventions, including, bagging for when his oxygen saturation became too low, they also used medication to close an open duct in his heart, medication for several infections and he needed photo therapy and eight blood transfusions
Our little baby boy was on a ventilator for 6 weeks. The treatment used to get him off the ventilator was complicated, but he gradually progressed to only needing nasal prongs. When Toby moved to the high dependency unit, he no longer needed an incubator, but still needed to be kept warm; he slept on a heated mattress.
As he got stronger, he was transferred back to the special care unit at the hospital where he was born, during his time there he was transferred back and forth to specialist hospitals for laser treatment in both eyes and a hernia operation, Eventually he was able to do normal things, like have a bath, wear clothes, feed with out a tube and have lots of cuddles. With support from specialists, it took Toby another three months of slow weaning off the oxygen, Toby Finally came home on March 24, 2009!
Toby is now 2 years old. He is a very happy, healthy, beautiful bouncy boy with a good appetite for food and cuddles. We are very proud of him and immensely grateful for the many medical staff that looked after him.
Posted by Rajan Patel
Fri, 27 Aug 2010 14:46:00 GMT
About a week ago, everyone suddenly quieted down and listened anxiously as Kamalika, our clinical researcher, took a phone call in the middle of the afternoon. Her voice slowly escalated and filled with excitement during the conversation; by the end she was jumping up and down with joy exclaiming, “We’re on our way now!” like an expectant parent. It was the call we had been waiting for: news that the first eligible low-birth weight (LBW) baby for our clinical trial had just been delivered and was ready to be put into the Embrace Infant Warmer.
We were all elated, considering how hard the team has been working to get to this moment: in addition to getting the product ready, preparing our clinical trial protocol, getting it approved by an ethical review board, and then coordinating the study with the doctors and nurses as the hospital. The clinical trial is comparing the Embrace Infant Warmer’s ability to maintain LBW babies’ temperatures against the current standard of care (including radiant warmers, incubators, and other practices that help babies stay warm).
As soon as she hung up the phone, she, Rahul, and I headed over to the hospital to observe the first baby of the study using our device. While I love the stimulating work atmosphere of Embrace, I was far more excited in this moment than any other. It suddenly struck me that what we’ve been working on for so long for was about to become a reality in use!
Nisha, a 2.3kg, rosy-cheeked baby girl, was placed into the Warmer. Luckily, any tense feelings diffused once she was put into the device. Nisha was initially experiencing cold stress, but was safely brought to normal body temperature after being put into the warmer! Also, our device successfully maintained its temperature of 35°C – 38°C for the full four-hour duration. Nisha had a twin brother who was not low birth weight. Interestingly enough, after she had been placed in the Embrace warmer, we observed that Nisha’s temperature was actually higher than her healthy brother’s. As you can see below, she comfortably slept while in the warmer (I’d be willing to bet it was THE most comfortably she’d ever slept in her life!):
Sleeping cozily in the Embrace warmer
Nisha and her twin brother
She stuck her tongue out in this picture just to be cute :-p
To get to this point, it’s been critical for us to do constant prototyping, testing, feedback, and iteration over the last year.This is even more important and difficult with medical devices such as ours, since the efficacy and safety of the product need to be thoroughly assessed before it can be tested in real use case scenarios. The validity and gratification that came from seeing our product effectively work on Nisha was unparalleled. It has taken a tremendous amount of time and effort from the team, and achieving this huge milestone has made it all worth it. But this is just the start.
As I was sitting in the auto rickshaw leaving the hospital at the end of the day, something suddenly struck me: we are one step closer to getting this product out—in fact, we’re one step away from launching. This early success has been a feeling of relief and fulfillment for us, and has inspired and energized our team to do everything we can to get this product to the millions of babies in need.
A devastating yet emotional letter from from a doctor who recently moved to Zambia. Her stories of the NICU are saddening, but these letters are testaments to why Embrace exists. They push us to work more determined than ever.
I’ve now been in Zambia just 12 days, but wow, what a week or two. It’s been a real baptism of fire with good, bad, ugly.. and truly tragic parts to it..hospital life here is mad and grim. Really and truly grim. I’ve seen babies and children die here EVERY DAY of diseases that are 100% preventable or treatable. I see children every day who are so malnourished that their skin is falling off them, forming terrible open painful sores, and whose whole bodies are swollen from lack of sufficient good food.
There is a SCBU here (special care baby unit- for premature babies) but it simply consists of wooden boxes with a light bulb for heat and a bowl of water to humidify the air.. and cockroaches crawling through them and these poor scrawny scraps of babies desperately fighting to stay alive against the odds.
I’ve been put on the pediatric ward- which is chaotic- kids are brought in unconscious every day. All day, every day. More kids who are floppy, lethargic or just plain old unconscious. One was even brought in dead. That was a shock..and then to have to tell the parents..
The nurses are their mum’s (or worse their grandmas) who have very different ideas about what their children need. They hate oxygen and nasogastric tubes because they associate them with the sick children who they see die, so they think that the oxygen kills the babies.
Back in the States we have had a poster presentation in Stanford giving us the opportunity to have our data peer reviewed AND (drum roll!) we have put our first 2 babies in our product to be warmed!
Our first baby girl was born on the 4th of March at 9:45am, and our second baby, also a girl, was born the next morning. The pictures below are proudly hung on our office walls. Depending on the frequency of births, we hope to have put ten babies in our product by the end of this month, and eventually an additional 50 babies for the purpose of this feedback study.
Our pride and joy in this progress stands in stark contrast to the frustrations we feel at our current inability to assist in instances of widespread and urgent need. The earthquake in Haiti still has severe effects till today, and it kills us to read stories such as these from doctors on the ground in Haiti where we KNOW that if we had a ready and tested product, we would be of tremendous value to needy families and save lives. But the fact of the matter is that while we have a technology that the Embrace team has personal confidence in, the product remains clinically untested. Doctors we have contacted in Haiti concur with us that despite the obvious need, now is not the time in Haiti to be experimenting with an untested infant warmer, no matter its potential.
If we went ahead anyway and put our product on the ground in Haiti would we be helping and serving babies in need? Yes we believe so. But for a delicate case like Haiti we will only move if we can do so in a way that is thoroughly responsible and in a way that we can guarantee the safety of babies put in our product.
As an organization we have a deeper duty to the bigger picture. Four million newborns die every year, one million in India alone, mostly from preventable or treatable causes. This is the problem that we are seeking to address, and we hope that the logic of this rationale allows us to make the choices and decisions that are right by those who need us the most, regardless the sick feeling we have when the pictures and e-mail from Haiti come streaming in.
