Advanced perinatal center to open in Almaty

A very advanced perinatal center will be opened in Almaty soon, city administration reports. A current stage involves equipment installation and training of personnel. Akhmetzhan Yessimov, Almaty akim (mayor) has already checked the quality of construction works and preparations for the opening ceremony. The facility will accommodate up to 150 beds. It is a modern maternity hospital for women with high-risk pregnancies. Lives and health of both mother and child is the hospital’s top priority. It will also focus on women’s reproductive functions and treatment of newborns weighing 500 grams or more. Doctors of the new hospital will perform special cardiological surgeries on small children with congenital heart diseases and make ophthalmological laser correction on newborns. The hospital will offer top class ultrasound screenings that could help diagnose many diseases, identify defects and take timely measures. Under the new project doctors and nurses will be trained in the best hospitals at the post soviet space and abroad. The hospital’s Pediatric surgeons have already undergone training in advanced pediatric cardiosurgery technologies in the best Russian pediatric cardiological centers in Tyumen and Novosibirsk. Emergency physicians have been trained in Saint-Petersburg, Moscow, Bergamo and Berlin. The new hospital has got cooperation agreements with Bakoulev Center for Cardiovascular Surgery in Russia and an international center in Bergamo. More pediatricians, cardiac surgeons, obstetrician-gynecologists and nurses will be trained at the new perinatal center itself. It is expected to become a training center in future. The center will open up in June 2011. This is the eighth medical facility built in Almaty during the last two years. Two more health care institutions are planned to start-up by the end of 2011. All the hospitals are furnished with state-of-the-art equipment complying with international standards.