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18 July 2008 13:04

Ukraine 3000 Foundation and Procter&Gamble Ukraine Launch Project to Help Children with Impaired Hearing

The Ukraine 3000 International Charitable Foundation and Procter&Gamble Ukraine Company launched a joint action to donate sets of modern equipment to render timely aid to children with impaired hearing.

This was announced at a press conference of July 18, 2008, at the OKHMATDIT Ukrainian Specialized Children’s Hospital. Among its participants were Head of the Board of Directors of the Ukraine 3000 Foundation Oleksandr Maksymchuk, Procter&Gamble Ukraine’s Director for External Ties Vitaly Prokopenko, Head Children’s Otolaryngologist at the Ministry of Health of Ukraine Anatoly Kosakivsky, and OKHMATDIT’s Head Physician Yuri Hladush.

The press-conference participants announced that, to render timely aid to Ukrainian children with impaired hearing, auditory centers of children’s hospitals in the Northern, Southern, Eastern, and Western regions of Ukraine (Zaporozhzhia Oblast Children’s Clinical Hospital. Volyn Oblast Children’s Territorial Medical Alliance, Chernihiv Oblast Children’s Hospital, and Children’s Hospital of the Autonomous Republic of the Crimea) will be reequipped.

The hospitals will receive diagnostic systems for registering brainstem auditory evoked potential, four diagnostic audiometers, and two extended-range impedance audiometers. The said equipment will give a chance to provide early diagnostics and rehabilitation to children with impaired hearing, allowing them to grow up as full-fledged society members instead of being disabled. The total cost of the equipment equals UAH 500,000.

“The Ukraine 3000 Foundation has being working with Ukrainian children’s hospitals for quite a while. That’s why we are familiar with children medicine’s most urgent problems,” Oleksandr Maksymchuk said. “Owing to our social partners like Procter&Gamble, a model of socially responsible business, we can deal with these problems successfully.”

On behalf of Ukraine 3000 Foundation and Procter&Gamble Ukraine, Messrs. Maksymchuk and Prokopenko passed to Mr. Kosakivsky a symbolical certificate verifying the parties’ intention to carry out this charitable action.

The participants of the press conference and members of the press visited OKHMATDIT’s Children’s Otolaryngology Unit, talking to the little patients and their parents and viewing the equipment installed at the unit. Besides, they visited the Neonatology and attended a newborn’s screening.

Today around 500,000 children in Ukraine suffer from impaired hearing. Almost 30,000 of them have irreversible hearing defects, with another 5,000 requiring immediate medical interference (cochlear implantation). Unfortunately, echo-screening of newborns, which allows diagnosing hearing losses in the very first days of life, is next to non-existent in Ukraine (while in the West up to 90-95% newborns undergo echo screening). Meanwhile, it is necessary to diagnose deafness or hearing losses before the age of 3-6 months. At 6 months a child has to obtain hearing-aid and start rehabilitation process.

Western research proves that if a child’s rehabilitation starts after 8 months of age, the child’s intellect is affected. With a later start of hearing aid, the child can remain deaf-mute forever. With 5-year-old and older children even a cochlear implantation, as a rule, fails to restore hearing. At the same time, with modern diagnostics, treatment, and rehabilitation such children can obtain education and grow up to become full-fledged members of the society.

This action is a continuation of the Healthy Children of Ukraine joint project by Ukraine 3000 and Procter&Gamble Ukraine within the framework of the Hospital to Hospital program. Its first event was purchasing four reanimobiles t the total cost of UAH 1,500,000 to Kirovohrad, Zakarpattia, and Luhansk Oblast Children’s Hospitals and Cherkasy Territorial Center for Emergency and Disaster Medicine in October 2005. In 2006 the philanthropists donated equipment to neonatology units of Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast Children’s Clinical Hospital and Khmelnytsky City Children’s Clinical Hospital. The total cost of the equipment was over UAH 770,000.