Soon, moms at children’s hospital to get free food

CHENNAI:

Mothers

accompanying their

children

to the Institute of Child Health, Egmore, will soon be provided food free after doctors’ conversations with them revealed that nearly half of them go hungry for at least a day when their children are admitted.

The noon meal assistance project for patients’ caretakers will be initiated in private-public-partnership mode on pilot basis, said doctors. The institute at any given point of time has at least 800 in-patients, 70% of whom are not from Chennai. Dr S Srinivasan, state neonatal intensive care unit coordinator, said, “Most mothers are daily wagers. We have women who stay with their ailing children here for more than two months.”

The

hospital

has received 750kg of

rice

, 300kg of dhal and 300 litres of oil from a private donor. Doctors will identify 200 women who have been staying in the hospital for more than a month and provide them midday meals, prepared by the nutrition department, said Arasar Seeralar, the hospital’s director. The project will be scaled up based on the response to the pilot.

A daily wager from Tiruvallur, Saritha, 34, has been in the hospital for more than a month after her four-year-old daughter was diagnosed with leukemia. “I eat at the Amma Unavagam on campus only as a last resort as the food there upsets my stomach,” said Saritha, who hasn’t met her husband or her two other children since her daughter was admitted. The hospital has also installed a cupboard outside the director’s room for people to drop off clothes and colouring books for children.