Countess of Wessex visits Gandhi Hospital

Secunderabad: Countess of Wessex, Sophie Helen, the member of the British royal family, visited state-run Gandhi Hospital on Monday. The Countess, who is on a visit to India to see the functioning of programmes supported by Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Trust, visited the paediatric ICU ward of the hospital.

In 1983, Elizabeth II visited the old Gandhi Hospital and she planted saplings. The Countess, who is also the Vice-Patron of the Diamond Jubilee Trust, interacted with the hospital authorities and later observed pre-term babies in the recently upgraded paediatric ICU at Gandhi Hospital.

At the hospital, the Countess also watched the special Retinopathy of Prematurity (ROP) screening programme being take up on infants at the paediatric ICU wards.

Along with many stakeholders including Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MOHFW), the Diamond Jubilee Trust is involved in tackling ROP, a potentially avoidable blindness in pre-term babies in India.

The Diamond Jubilee Trust is working across the Commonwealth to end avoidable blindness and empower young leaders. According to the Trust, national guidelines to prevent ROP have been integrated across India's health system to detect and treat the medical condition.

Following the visit of Countess of Wessex, the official Twitter feed of The Royal Family tweeted 'The oxygen given to babies in the incubator to survive can damage their immature retinal blood vessels. Without detection and treatment it can cause irreversible blindness".

Under ROP scheme that is for the treatment of retinopathy of prematurity, this scheme is funded by Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Trust, who is supporting Gandhi Hospital by providing well-equipped machinery that are worth lakhs of rupees. She is the vice patron of the Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Trust.