The Rotunda Hospital and The Rotunda Foundation celebrated World Prematurity Day on Friday 17th of November.
Did you know, 1 in 10 babies are born prematurely? World Prematurity Day raises awareness of the challenges that premature babies and their parents go through all across the globe.
In honour of the day, the Rotunda Hospital, with the Rotunda Foundation and the Rotunda Knitters hosted a series of events to celebrate the strength and tenacity of the ‘premies’ and their parents that come through our doors.
From midnight on 17th November, as the hospital lit up in bright purple, (the colours of World Prematurity Day), the Rotunda Knitters donated gorgeous knitted gift packs to babies born in the hospital throughout the day. 
We launched our ‘Tentacles for Tinies’ initiative, which gives a crocheted octopus to babies in the NICU. The octopus tentacles replicate the umbilical cord and can comfort premature babies while they recuperate in the NICU.
You can read more about Tentacles for Tinies here.
Judy Mullane, who writes the BabyAmyAzing blog about her experiences with her Rotunda premie Amy, ran the Dublin Marathon in aid of the Rotunda NICU and raised €5000. She presented the money to Sheila Costigan, Director of the Rotunda Foundation, and Prof Afif El-Khuffash, Consultant Neonatologist, on this very important day.
To round off World Prematurity Day here in the Hospital, we invited some of our ‘NICU graduates’ from 2015 to join us in The Pillar Room, along with their mums and dads and other family members, to meet the doctors and nurses who helped them right after they were born. We showcased some of the neonatal research that the Hospital is undertaking to help provide better care and outcomes for premature babies and displayed some of the initiatives and supports we have in place for premies and their parents, like our ‘Beads of Courage’ initiative, and the Aidan and Donnachas Wings project, and our mobile intensive care unit for transporting sick infants to receive tertiary care.
