ONE of Singapore’s top hospitals — the KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital (KKH) — has been honoured by the World Health Organisation (WHO) for providing excellent care to women during childbirth and to their newborn.
ONE OF THE FINEST: A frontal view of the hospital.
The Hospital, the second in Singapore to receive an WHO award, has earned a strong national and international reputation as a provider of excellent prenatal care as well as a comprehensive referral centre.
KKH shares this year’s prize with Georgia’s Georgian Respiratory Association, and its prenatal team also bagged the United Arab Emirates Health Foundation Prize, given annually to people or institutions for making outstanding contributions to health development. KKH’s other achievements include the success of two of its doctors in performing Singapore’s first laparoscopic radical hysterectomy. Five similar procedures have been successfully carried out since November, 2009.
A group of journalists from the region were recently taken on a tour of the hospital by Adeline Kwan, the assistant manager for International Medical Services.
She explained KKH’s multi-disciplinary team provides patients with stateof- the-art care with world class results achieved and maintained over several years in all areas, leading to a decrease in maternal mortality and eclampsia rates.
With the improvement, the hospital’s specialists have cut the rate of eclampsia from 6.7 per 10,000 births in the 1990s to 1.6 per 10,000 births now. KKH has also greatly improved on critical Caesarean sections, among others.
This has more than halved the death rate of new mothers to five per 100,000 births and stillborns to fewer than five per 1,000 births.