Heartbeat: Preventing cerebral palsy in pre–term babies

June 19, 2019

Pre-term births are increasing and more premature babies than ever are surviving, however, the number born with cerebral palsy also continues to rise. Here at SWB, our maternity department is committed to breaking the trend and has set out its plans to join the national PReCePT prevention campaign.

PReCePT is an evidence based project developed by the West of England Academic Health Science Network which looks to reduce the incidence of cerebral palsy in pre– term babies by administering intravenous magnesium sulphate to mothers during pre– term labour.

The drug which costs approximately £1 per dose is proven to be effective at reducing the risk of developing cerebral palsy in babies born before 30 weeks by approximately 30 per cent. Nationally between 4,000 and 5,000 babies are born pre–term, if all mothers of at risk babies received the intervention, we could prevent 200 – 300 from developing the debilitating condition.

To find out more about the project, we caught up with Consultant Obstetrician, Ashwini Bilagi, she said: “PReCePT is a really simple and straight forward initiative, all we have to do is identify mothers at risk of pre–term labour and make sure that this drug is offered to them. It’s extremely low cost and the benefits it offers are significant.

“At our Trust, we’re committed to making sure that our expectant mothers get the highest levels of care so we’re making this project part of our normal thought process. All of the necessary equipment to dose and administer the drug are readied in PReCePT go boxes, so that when we need to administer a dose, we have everything ready and waiting. Our target is to make sure that 85 per cent of our expectant pre–term mothers take up the intervention so that their babies are given every chance at a health start in life.”