The human milk bank Upington . Every baby deserves the best possible start in life. That’s why, here at the South African Breastmilk Reserve (SABR), we’ve made it our mission to supply donated breastmilk to the most vulnerable infants around the country. Rich in antibodies, these precious donations play a crucial role in lowering infant mortality rates and have helped save more than 8 000 lives since our inception in 2003. But with a premature infant dying every 20 minutes in South Africa and one of the lowest breastfeeding rates in the world, there’s still a long way to go.
HELPING SAVE NEWBORN LIVES
SABR is a non-profit organization that came to life in 2003. Since then so much has happened. Today we’re the largest human-milk banking partner of the South African Department of Health and Netcare, associated with 44 milk banks that supply anything from 75 to 100 hospitals around the country, in a year.
The Kimberly Hospital Human Milk bank was established under the auspices of the Fuchs Foundation in 2007/08.
Since then the human milk bank has been showing positive banking and feeds the NICU on site as well as acts as top up facility for Universitas hospital. Kimberly Hospital is a secondary facility and refers patients to Universitas, maintaining consistent modes of feeding amongst referral hospitals is a key to healthy babies across NICU. In other words if referral hospitals transfer babies with infections that are associated with feeding practices these babies put at risk the infants in the NICU they are referred to and therefore it is of utmost importance that Tertiary and Secondary hospital facilities embrace the same infant feeding culture so as not burden one another.
